When Edward Hopper painted his self-portrait during the late 1920s, he had already perfected his disguise as an ordinary American businessman. He was well into his 40s, finally able to afford to give up commercial illustration, but no props in the picture signal that Hopper is a painter, no easel in the background or paint-stiffened brushes on the floor. Like Wallace Stevens, avant-garde poet disguised as Hartford insurance executive, Hopper depicts himself as just another anonymous contributor to American prosperity. He had waited a long time for financial success; if his contemporaries wanted to place him in an orderly progression of realists—from Thomas Cole and Eakins to Robert Henri and Hopper—he was willing to pass as a blue-eyed chronicler of the American scene, Norman Rockwell with angst. "The critics give you an identity," Hopper wrote. "And sometimes, even, you give it a push." Hopper's push was to paint recognizably American subjects—the all-night cafes, lonely hotel rooms, and aging Victorian houses at the heart of the probing retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—while hinting at a more private, covert emotional landscape.