For an artist associated with depicting urban angst, Hopper painted a lot of rural architecture. Between 1914 and 1929, he and his wife, Jo, summered in Maine, where he sketched local buildings, including lighthouses. The hardy staple of wall calendars and jigsaw puzzles was an odd choice of subject, but he painted so many lighthouses that they are as much a Hopper motif as his scenes of urban alienation. Captain Upton's House was painted in 1927. Only three years earlier, Le Corbusier had published Toward an Architecture, in which he proclaimed that "the house is a machine for living in," and lighthouse towers were the sort of utilitarian structure that Modern architects admired. But Hopper sends a different message. His house is no machine—far from it. Its dainty ornament contrasts strongly with the sturdy tower: humanist architecture vs. functional engineering.