Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Upper Nyack, New York. After graduating from high school in 1899, he headed 26 miles south to New York City, where he lived until his death in 1967. New York urbanized rapidly and soon skyscrapers crowded the horizon. Hopper, however, paid no attention to those symbols of modernity. “I just never cared for the vertical,” he said in 1956. Instead, Hopper immortalized the old New York in his (not completely) realist style. —Clara Molot