Edna Boies Hopkins — 2007

Strong in Character, Colorful in Expression

“It is particularly gratifying to find a catalogue focused on an American woman who was once widely known, Edna Boies Hopkins (1872-1937), and even better that she specialized in woodblock prints that are still available and affordable.... This publication and exhibition will surely stimulate interest among collectors and curators, thanks in particular to Vasseur’s insightful essay, intriguing historical photographs, and useful appendices.”

— Fine Art Connoisseur

Edna Boies Hopkins (1872–1937) is best known for her floral woodblock prints that range from delicate Japanese-inspired stylizations to boldly colored and progressively modernist works. In her brief twenty-year career, Hopkins produced seventy-four known woodblock prints, including figurative work and landscapes as well as floral compositions. This catalogue raisonné is the first in-depth study of this once well-known American artist. It illustrates all of Hopkins’s known prints, related drawings, and studies.

Born in Hudson, Michigan, Hopkins attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1895 to 1898. In 1899 she took classes with the influential artist Arthur Wesley Dow, an advocate of Japanese art. Following her marriage in 1904, Hopkins and her husband settled in Paris, where they remained until the outbreak of World War I. After returning to America, Hopkins became part of a small group of artists in Provincetown, whose innovations in woodblock printmaking have come to be known as the Provincetown print or the white line woodcut. In 1917, a visit to the Cumberland Falls region of Kentucky provided the inspiration for some of Hopkins’s most important prints which predate the work of American regionalist painters and printmakers by a decade or more.

In addition to the catalogue raisonné, Edna Boies Hopkins includes much new biographical research along with a census of her prints and a comprehensive list of her exhibitions.

Exhibition Dates
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH,
December 14, 2007–March 2, 2008

Springfield Museum of Art,
Springfield, OH, beginning March 2008

Provincetown Art Association and Museum,
Provincetown, MA, beginning June 2008

Dominique H. Vasseur, curator of European art at the Columbus Museum of Art, is the author of The Soul Unbound: The Photographs of Jane Reece and The Lithographs of Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret.