Gail Levin, Hopper Expert, Questions Sanborn Holdings Source NYACK, N.Y. - The wide-planked floors creak, and the marble sink upstairs has cracks. But Edward Hopper's boyhood home here can still withstand the winds coming off the nearby Hudson River, the inspiration for the artist's early nautical paintings. Swann Galleries Hopper's "Maiden Wait" (1899), once in the Sanborn Collection, was for sale this month. The Rev. Arthayer R. Sanborn was the subject of a 1972 article about his relationship with Hopper in the local Journal-News. The house now operates as a gallery - the Edward Hopper House Art Center - and last month a room there was dedicated in memory of the Rev. Arthayer R. Sanborn, a Hopper family friend who led the First Baptist Church down the block. The center says it is paying tribute to Mr. Sanborn, who died in 2007, because he and his family had lent it many Hopper artworks and artifacts from his collection over the years. But Gail Levin, one of the world's leading experts on Hopper, has come forward to object to the recognition. In an e-mail she sent to more than a half-dozen news organizations, she said there were serious questions about how the minister, who cared for the house when it fell empty in the late 1960s, came by his collection. How did he get hundreds of drawings? Ms. Levin said in an interview. He had the key to the family home in Nyack. Ms. Levin, an art historian who compiled the Hopper catalogue raisonné, the only extensive inventory of his work, said her suspicions were aroused decades ago by discrepancies in the accounts of how the minister had acquired such a large collection of Hopper paintings, drawings and watercolors, more than 100 of which he ultimately put up for sale. Mr. Sanborn told dealers and curators that many of them had been given him by Hopper and his wife, Josephine, whom he spent some time caring for in their later years. But Ms. Levin said that Mr. Sanborn complained to her in the 1970s that the Hoppers had not given him anything. And the Hoppers gave very few gifts, she said, and never listed any to the minister in the detailed records they kept. Mr. Sanborn said over the years that he had purchased other artworks and many items of Hopper memorabilia from the estate of Mrs. Hopper after she died in 1968, less than a year after her husband. But under the terms of Mrs. Hopper's will, all of Hopper's art was supposed to have gone to the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney received some 2,500 works from Mrs. Hopper as the prime beneficiary of her will. Ms. Levin, as the Hopper curator at the Whitney for eight years, was the chief researcher on the bequest. "I gave my youth to Edward Hopper scholarship, and I don't want to see this perversion of the truth," she said. Representatives of the Hopper House said the dispute was too dated, and the materials too important to their institution, for it to abandon a long relationship with the Sanborn family. One of the minister's sons denied Ms. Levin's assertions, characterizing them as decades old. "Then and now, they are unfounded and without merit," said the son, Philip Sanborn, who agreed to respond to questions only by e-mail. He added that he had been present when Mrs. Hopper gave his parents some of the works. "Presumably, she did so," he said, "because she was appreciative of the caretaking they had provided to Edward and were still providing to her." But Ms. Levin's concerns are shared by the children of one of Mrs. Hopper's closest friends. "Mrs. Hopper didn't give anybody anything - it just wasn't like her," said Anton Schiffenhaus, whose mother, Mary, was a beneficiary of Mrs. Hopper's will. So the idea that a man like this would acquire this great trove through gifts from Mrs. Hopper is absurd. It just doesn't stand up to the facts. And the daughter of a woman who bought the house and its contents from the estate in 1970, two years after Mrs. Hopper's death, said her mother was disappointed to find that Hopper art had mysteriously disappeared from the empty house before she closed on the sale.