It is hard to imagine a more distinctively American reaction to Paris than that of the painter Edward Hopper when he arrived for the first time in autumn 1906. “Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet to the taste, after the raw disorder of New York,” Hopper wrote to his mother, in a letter now on display at the exhibition “Edward Hopper’s New York” in the city’s Whitney Museum.
Paris was startlingly clean, its transportation reliable and precise, the climate milder than New York’s “biting cold”. But its people were “small and have poor physiques” – here there were none of the wide shoulders and “well-cut features” one found on Broadway – and the sky lacked the deep blue purity of New York. For all their smartness, the buildings were monotonous, all painted the same buff colour.
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