Martin Lewis: The Forgotten Etcher Who Taught Edward Hopper and Drew New York After Dark

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When people picture a lonely American city at night, they usually picture Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Far fewer have heard of Martin Lewis, the Australian ex-sailor who showed Hopper how to etch a copper plate years before that diner was ever painted. At the end of the 1920s Lewis was selling out whole editions of his New York night scenes in a matter of months. By 1962 he'd given away his press and died almost completely forgotten. These days a single good print can fetch more than $50,000.

Quick Answers

Who was Martin Lewis? An Australian-born printmaker (1880 or 1881 to 1962) best known for etchings and drypoints of New York streets at night and in bad weather.
Did he teach Edward Hopper? Yes. He showed Hopper the basics of etching around 1915, although how much credit he deserves has been argued over ever since.
What are his best-known prints? Relics (Speakeasy Corner), Glow of the City, Shadow Dance, Spring Night, Greenwich Village and Stoops in Snow.
What's his work worth now? The best impressions have made $52,500 at auction. Some of those same prints sold for $28 when they were new.
Where can you see his prints? The Detroit Institute of Arts holds his master set and record book, with big collections at the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum and the British Museum.

A Gold-Rush Town Boy With a Welsh Father

Lewis was born in Castlemaine, Victoria, an old gold-mining town north-west of Melbourne. The Old Print Shop, the New York dealer that has handled his work for decades, gives his birthday as 9 July 1880, and the British Museum also goes with 1880. Plenty of other collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, still list 1881, so you'll see both.

He was the second of eight children. His father, Evan Lewis, came from Pembrokeshire in Wales, which goes some way to explaining why Martin's older brother was called Pembroke. Pembroke reckoned all the drawing was a waste of time. Martin left school at 14 and took a job at the Castlemaine Leader newspaper, and it was a drawing he left lying on an editor's desk that changed things. A local art teacher, Thomas Fisher Levick, spotted it and offered to teach him for free. Those classes at the Castlemaine School of Mines, which started on 15 March 1895, are thought to be pretty much the only formal art training he ever had.

Caves, Cartoons and a Presidential Campaign

After his father died in 1898 and he'd fallen out with Pembroke, Lewis left home. He drifted around rural Victoria and New South Wales doing odd jobs and, for a while, lived at an artists' bush camp in caves overlooking Sydney Harbour. He took a few lessons at Julian Ashton's art school and, according to the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, got two of his cartoons into the Bulletin.

Around 1900 he went to America as a merchant seaman. His first job there sounds made up but isn't: painting stage decorations for William McKinley's 1900 presidential campaign in San Francisco, a detail PRINT Magazine also picks up. He spent time in Chicago before settling in New York as a commercial illustrator. Exactly when he got there is fuzzy. He was listed as an artist in New York by 1905, while the Australian gallery puts his settling in the city at 1909. It was a busy time to be drawing for a living in Manhattan, the same magazine world that made illustrators like Władysław T. Benda famous.

The Edward Hopper Question

In 1910 Lewis made a trip to London and Wales, where he fell for the work of the Victorian etcher Seymour Haden. He also met the singer and pianist Esta Verez there, and the two of them were together for roughly the next ten years. Back in New York their circle took in poets like Lola Ridge, William Carlos Williams and Alfred Kreymborg.

Lewis knew Hopper through commercial work, and in 1915 Hopper asked him to show him how etching was done. Lewis's own earliest surviving etchings date from that same year. Hopper went on to make around 70 prints before dropping printmaking in 1928 to concentrate on painting, Open Culture notes.

How much Lewis actually taught him is where it gets messy. Surovek Gallery says Hopper credited the training with shaping his later work, Nighthawks included. Yet Hopper also objected when an exhibition essay said he'd studied under Lewis, describing him as "an old friend of mine" who'd only helped with mechanical jobs like grounding plates and printing. The same piece claims Jo Hopper said the Lewises had cut them off because Edward's success was too much for them. That last bit rests on a single source, so treat it with care. Historians are still split. What nobody argues about is that both men's early prints share the same obsession with long shadows, hard light and the city after dark.

Lewis did have one technical rule he never budged on. Every effect had to come from work on the plate itself, never from wiping or fiddling with the ink at the printing stage. It's a big reason his blacks look so deep and his lamplight so sharp.

Sixteen Months in Japan

When things ended with Verez in 1920, Lewis sailed for Japan meaning to stay for good. He studied ukiyo-e woodblock prints and painted and drew constantly, but didn't make a single print while he was there. Sixteen months later he was broke and back in New York. The Japan he saw wasn't far off the one in Herbert Geddes' Yokohama glass plates, taken just a few years earlier.

He went back to commercial work for a bit, married Lucile Deming in 1924 and started printmaking again with Japanese subjects such as Bridge Near Nikko (1926). Their son was born on 29 October 1924, and his birth certificate just said "Boy" Lewis. Martin wanted to call him Hayden Seymour Lewis, which looks a lot like a nod to his hero Seymour Haden, but Lucile wasn't having it. Martin called him Hayden anyway, for the rest of his life, and the son eventually made it official when he joined the military in the Second World War.

Selling Out New York After Dark

From 1928 Lewis threw himself into New York at night and in rotten weather. He skipped the tourist landmarks and drew stoops, rooftops, elevated railway tracks, street corners and people hurrying home under a single lamp. His shows at Kennedy and Company in Manhattan were a hit with critics and buyers, and he gave up commercial art altogether.

Relics (Speakeasy Corner), from 1928, sold out in four months at $28 a print, and a month later a trial proof went for $100. The speakeasy in the title was very real, part of the Prohibition city that women bootleggers helped keep supplied. Editions of 100 sold out, and Kennedy published 17 new Lewis prints between 1929 and 1931. Glow of the City won him the Charles M. Lea Prize in 1930 and Spring Night, Greenwich Village won it again in 1931, set in the same Village of salons and late nights where Eve Adams ran her tearoom.

In 1931 he was included in the Masters of Etching series alongside Whistler, Goya and Rembrandt, which called him "the most psychological interpreter of American life" in New York. If you like what Brassaï did with Paris by night a few years later, Lewis is doing something very similar with a needle and a copper plate.

The Depression Ends the Party

The good times didn't last. The Wall Street Crash took the print market down with it, and by 1932 Lewis couldn't afford New York. He moved to rural Connecticut and was based at Sandy Hook, near Danbury, for about four years. He kept working, swapping city streets for snowy fields, freight trains and country houses at night. Ha'nted (1932) and The Passing Freight, Danbury (1934) both come from this stretch.

He went back to New York in 1936, but the buyers hadn't come back with him. He kept making strong prints like Shadow Magic (1939), Chance Meeting (1940 to 1941) and Yorkville Night (1947), but the attention had moved on, and then Abstract Expressionism made realist city scenes look old-fashioned. From 1944 he taught graphics at the Art Students League, giving it up in 1952 because of ill health.

Around 1960, with hardly anyone interested in his work, he gave away his etching press and equipment. He died in 1962, aged 81 if you go with the 1881 date, and was largely forgotten. Across his whole career he editioned 147 prints, based on Paul McCarron's catalogue raisonné as summarised by Printed Editions.

From Unsellable to $52,500

For years after his death some auction houses struggled to shift his prints at all, with whole lots failing to reach their reserves. That's changed. At Swann Galleries in New York, Shadow Dance set a record in September 2010, Glow of the City matched it in March 2015, and in September 2016 Relics (Speakeasy Corner) sold for $52,500, equalling the top mark again. The Australian Art Sales Digest reported that five of the nine Lewis prints in that 2016 sale went to one Australian collector, and that the Art Gallery of New South Wales had bought Glow of the City to sit alongside its Stoops in Snow.

Rarer early pieces can surprise people too. In 2019 an etching from around 1919, Men Working on Elevated Train Tracks, Looking at Airplane in Sky, made its auction debut at $42,500, Fine Books Magazine reported. Back home, Castlemaine's regional gallery staged Martin Lewis: Stepping into the Light in 2002, which toured to Devonport, Heide and the Queensland Art Gallery. Not bad for a lad whose brother thought drawing was pointless.