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'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.'

The Realist Painter of the inter-war period, Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967) painted small town American life, full of solitude and introspection. He was the most important modern American painter of his time and he once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.'. This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and introspection important themes in his painting.

From Techniques of the Great Masters of Art, `House by the Railroad' was his first painting to represent successfully forms defined and modeled in light. In this painting, a solitary Victorian house and railroad track are represented in a way more expressive of Hopper's imagination than of the real world - most of Hopper's paintings are composites with the subject matter derived from several sources. The observer's viewpoint is not indicated and the track which sweeps across and beyond the edges of the canvas serve to disconnect the house from the ground and the observer's side of the railroad. It is also Hopper's method, which drew from, but did not specifically represent, the American scene which contributes to the strange and slightly disturbing effect of the painting.