Floyd D. Hopper

Floyd D. Hopper was born in Martin County, Indiana, on November 1, 1909, and died on July 2, 1984. He is regarded as the dean of Indiana watercolorists.

He attended the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis from 1929 to 1933, where he studied with William Forsyth, Clifton Wheeler, Paul Hadley, and Donald Mattison. Forsyth was a member of the Hoosier Group.

In the 1930s and early 1940s Hopper painted Indiana in the later years of the Great Depression, working in oil, watercolor, and lithography in the American Scene manner used by regionalist painters across the Midwest. Works from those years include Thirteenth And Roosevelt (1935), A Summer Rain (1936), Red Farm (1937), Our Alley (1939), Railroad Yard (1939), and Wash Day (1940).

In 1941 he joined Hetherington and Berner, a steel fabricator in Indianapolis, and later helped found the Noblesville Casting Company. He returned to painting full time in 1958.

From then on he concentrated on watercolor, both as a painter and as a teacher. For more than twenty years he taught at the Indianapolis Art League and at Cherry Hill Studio in Noblesville. Gallery notes date the Art League classes to 1963–1983. His watercolors won prizes at the Hoosier Salon, the Indiana Artists Club, and the Indiana State Fair. He was elected to membership in the Indiana Academy in 1979. In 1987 the Indiana General Assembly posthumously recognized him as a major Indiana artist.

Hopper’s work is in private collections and in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana University, Franklin College, DePauw University, Ball State University, and the Brown County Art Guild.