Hopper was born in 1882 in the Hudson River town of Nyack, N.Y., at a time when the once-fashionable resort was beginning its long decline. Empty hotels soon lined the river, which Hopper could see from his bedroom window. Trained as a commercial artist in New York, Hopper returned to Nyack on weekends to make some money teaching art. His father ran a dry-goods business; his mother served lemonade to the local kids, including Joseph Cornell's sister, who took Saturday art classes with young Edward. It's weird to think of those two homegrown Surrealists, Hopper and Cornell, growing up in the same sad Gilded Age town, but it makes sense. The hotels and billowing mansions hinted of former lives and passions, and the boats on the river promised flight and exotic travel. Hopper's paintings—portraits, really—of Victorian houses, like this one painted in Gloucester, north of Boston, have a strange interior life, wind wafting the awnings like a breath of inspiration or suppressed desire.