Edna Boies Hopkins — (2007)

Strong in Character, Colorful in Expression

By Dominique H. Vasseur

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