E.O. Hoppé | Biography

E. O. Hoppé was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics in Great Britain and the US between the wars. Among the hundreds of well-known figures he photographed were George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, A. A. Milne, T. S. Eliot, G. K Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes, and Queen Mary, King George, and members of the royal family.

The prototypical celebrity photographer, his popularity at the time can only be compared to that of celebrity photographers of the late twentieth century like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn. Twenty-five years later, Cecil Beaton wrote an introduction to Hoppé's autobiography, One Hundred Thousand Exposures, and called him simply “The Master.” And yet, until well after his death at 94 in 1972, E. O. Hoppé’s extraordinary photographic achievement was mostly known and understood by photography scholars, museum curators, and a handful of collectors. Only recently has his place begun to be fully appreciated in the history of photography, and a renaissance of interest in his art has finally commenced.

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	E.O. Hoppé, Self-portrait, 1907
	E. O. Hoppé was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics in Great Britain and the US between the wars. Among the hundreds of well-known figures he photographed were George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, A. A. Milne, T. S. Eliot, G. K Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes, and Queen Mary, King George, and members of the royal family. The prototypical celebrity photographer, his popularity at the time can only be compared to that of celebrity photographers of the late twentieth century like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn. Twenty-five years later, Cecil Beaton wrote an introduction to Hoppé's autobiography, One Hundred Thousand Exposures, and called him simply “The Master.” And yet, until well after his death at 94 in 1972, E. O. Hoppé’s extraordinary photographic achievement was mostly known and understood by photography scholars, museum curators, and a handful of collectors. Only recently has his place begun to be fully appreciated in the history of photography, and a renaissance of interest in his art has finally commenced.more
	© Copyright 2008 Curatorial Assistance, Inc./The E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection