Soon he transferred to the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons The New School for Design. Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899. He later said, "I admire him greatly.I read him over and over again." In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hopper's parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income. In high school (he graduated from Nyack High School in 1899), he dreamed of being a naval architect, but after graduation he declared his intention to follow an art career. Later in life, he mostly depicted women as the figures in his paintings. Though a tall and quiet teenager, his prankish sense of humor found outlet in his art, sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in comic situations. In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent himself as skinny, ungraceful, and homely. Hopper's other earliest oils such as Old ice pond at Nyack and his c.1898 painting Ships have been identified as copies of paintings by artists including Bruce Crane and Edward Moran. In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, which he copied from a reproduction in The Art Interchange, a popular journal for amateur artists.
By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil-drawing from nature as well as making political cartoons. The detailed examination of light and shadow which carried on throughout the rest of his career can already be found in these early works. The earliest of these drawings include charcoal sketches of geometric shapes, including a vase, bowl, cup and boxes. Hopper first began signing and dating his drawings at the age of ten. Hopper's parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books. He also demonstrated his mother's artistic heritage. He readily absorbed his father's intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures. Hopper was a good student in grade school and showed talent in drawing at age five. Vase (1893), example of Edward Hopper's earliest signed and dated artwork with attention to light and shadow. It serves as a nonprofit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances, and special events. It is now operated as the Edward Hopper House Art Center. His birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. His father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid. They were raised in a strict Baptist home. Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools.
Although not as successful as his forebears, Garrett provided well for his two children with considerable help from his wife's inheritance. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Elizabeth Griffiths Smith and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant. He was one of two children of a comfortably well-off family. Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City. Childhood home of Edward Hopper in Nyack, New York