NEW YORK, NY.- Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, today announced that the Whitney Museum of American Art has received a major donation of archival materials relating to the artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967). The materials, to be known as the Sanborn Hopper Archive at the Whitney Museum of American Art, are the generous gift of the Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust. The Sanborn Hopper Archive will be housed at the Whitney’s Frances Mulhall Achilles Library.

Mr. Weinberg commented, “The Sanborn Family has stewarded this collection and Hopper’s legacy for decades. We are delighted that the family has chosen the Whitney—home to the largest collection of Edward Hopper works in the world—as the site for these fascinating and informative materials, and I am deeply grateful to the Sanborn family for entrusting us to establish this archive.”

The gift consists of about 4,000 items including more than 300 letters and notes from Hopper to his family, friends, and colleagues, twenty-one notebooks in Hopper’s own hand, and ninety notebooks by Hopper’s wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, as well as extensive archival material relating to Hopper’s artistic career and personal life, such as photographs, personal papers, and dealer records.

Carol Troyen, Kristin and Roger Servison Curator Emerita of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and principal organizer of the MFA’s 2007 Hopper retrospective, remarked, “This archive, so carefully and respectfully preserved, is a treasure trove of new information about one of the most admired and enigmatic American artists. The Hoppers were meticulous record keepers, and the notebooks, photographs, ledgers, correspondence, and even the ticket stubs included in the Sanborns’ generous donation provide insights into the Hoppers’ daily routines, their friendships, the economics of his art-making, and—perhaps most enlightening—Hopper’s private reflections on painting. It is a boon to scholars and to those interested in both Hopper the artist and Hopper the person.”

This collection exemplifies the long-standing commitment the Whitney has made to the work of Edward Hopper, a relationship that began in 1920, when the Whitney Studio Club, the forerunner to the Museum, gave him his first solo exhibition. Since the founding of the Museum in 1930, the Whitney has exhibited Hopper’s work more than that of any other artist.

The Sanborn Hopper Archive will strengthen the Whitney’s extensive holdings relating to Edward Hopper, which already includes over 3,000 works of art—the foremost collection of Hoppers in the world—as well as over eighty linear feet of research material in the Edward and Josephine Hopper Research Collection.

Carter E. Foster, the Whitney’s former Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings, who organized the Museum’s Hopper Drawing exhibition in 2013 and is now Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at the Blanton Museum of Art, noted: “The Sanborn donation is the holy grail of primary source material for Edward Hopper and his milieu. Its importance cannot be overstated, and having it available to scholars and curators will surely transform how we understand the mind and creative process of this great American artist.”

Taken as a whole, the Whitney will house the single largest repository of Hopper material, giving researchers, scholars, and the public the opportunity to contextualize the life of the artist as well as his prodigious artistic career through his works of art and archival material. These resources, coupled with existing archival collections in the Whitney’s Research Resources department, will provide unparalleled possibilities for future Hopper scholarship. The Sanborn Hopper Archive will be open to scholars by appointment after the collection is catalogued, processed, and researched, as the Whitney plans to explore potential exhibitions, programs, and publications making use of the Archive’s extraordinarily rich materials.