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The Appleton Museum of Art, College of Central Florida, announces the display of the recent acquisition “Ships,” 1898, by legendary American artist Edward Hopper.

The painting, on display in the second-floor Maritime Gallery through the end of the year, is extraordinary due to the fact that Hopper painted it when he was only 16 years old. The work depicts a scene of both sailing and coal-fired ships on the water and is one of the artist’s earliest works.

Hopper is probably best known for his landmark painting “Nighthawks,” a study of big-city isolation that shows solitary figures in a late-night diner. Although traditionally focused on clean lines and minimal focal points, in “Ships,” the young artist’s experimentation with spacing, composition and line is evident in the solitary ship in the foreground and the busy collection of ships in the background. Eventually, these extraneous details will be eliminated and the compositional simplicity that Hopper is known for will emerge.

Edward Hopper was born in 1882 into an educated, middle-class family in Nyack, New York. From a young age, Hopper exhibited creative talent and was encouraged to pursue his artistic education by his family. Interestingly, his love of the sea and the ships that sailed it conjured an early dream of becoming a ship’s architect. After graduating from high school, he entered the New York School of Art and Design, where he studied with impressionist William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri of the Ashcan School. This thought-provoking juxtaposition of styles led Hopper to his early Impressionistic color choices and focus on light that converged with his interest in portraying realistic subject matter. After marrying fellow painter Josephine Nivison in 1924, Hopper’s career took off, due in large part to his wife’s art world connections. Working as a professional fine artist throughout the 1930s, and having the honor of a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hopper created some of his most renowned work in the 1940s. Although his popularity as an artist dwindled somewhat with the rise of the Abstract Impressionists during the 1950s, Hopper continued to have retrospectives at the world’s most prestigious museums. He died on May 15, 1967, at the age of 84, and bequeathed his work to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The Appleton Museum, Artspace and Store are open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday, noon-5 p.m. A campus of the College of Central Florida, the Appleton Museum of Art is located at 4333 E. Silver Springs Blvd., Ocala, east of downtown on SR 40 (exit 352 east off I-75 or exit 268 west off I-95). Parking is free. For more information, call 352-291-4455 or visit