A Review of "Edward Hopper From the front steps of the house where Edward Hopper was born, in 1882, you can look straight down Nyack's Second Avenue to a vertical swath of the Hudson River, dotted with boats at work and at play. And inside what is now the Edward Hopper House Art Center, in the little room that once served as the Hopper family kitchen, a handful of paintings, artifacts and student doodles suggest how deeply marked Hopper was by his boyhood proximity to the busy waterfront of his hometown. The Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust EARLY ARTIFACTS Some of the works and tools of the young Edward Hopper are on display in the former kitchen of the Hopper family home in Nyack. Here, "Little Boy Looking at the Sea," drawn on the reverse of a report card, undated. Hopper's old paint box. Although he is best known for starkly poetic depictions of 20th-century urban desolation, as an adult Hopper split his time evenly between a New York apartment bordering Washington Square Park and a Cape Cod house in South Truro, and he often painted marine subjects. The foundation for those paintings - and others - can be seen in "Edward Hopper: Early Nautical Scenes," which begins with a display of his homemade wooden boat models. There's nothing sleek or artful about these elementary carvings - nothing to indicate that, as a teenager, he would have enough carpentry skill to build himself a full-size sailboat. It's not pictured in the exhibition, but a permanent display of family photographs on an adjacent wall features young Edward at the oars of a rowboat on Rockland Lake, perhaps already dreaming of a more sprightly craft for his water excursions. The labels note that Hopper, who lived in the Nyack house until he was 28, had once considered a career in marine architecture. But the hard-used child's paint box that was found in the house after he died, in 1967, attests to a more compelling ambition. He inscribed it with the legend "Would-Be-Artist," and the nearby pages of lined notebook paper marked with childish boats and strings of penmanship exercises offer some support for the "would-be." But as the wry exhibition text puts it, "Learning script clearly did not have the appeal that drawing boats had." By the time Hopper made the show's elegant, painstakingly detailed rendering of a compass, he was well on his way to becoming the expert draftsman who would find lasting fame as a stubborn delineator of the real. There's no date on the tiny but compelling "Little Boy Looking at the Sea," an ink drawing Hopper made on the reverse of a report card he received at age 9. This item is among several that were first seen here last year in "Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years." The child in the image, facing away from the viewer with his hands clasped behind his back and his feet inches from the lapping surf, seems both younger and older than that. From his size, he appears to be just past toddlerhood; but his posture is pensive and he seems utterly devoid of playfulness, like so many of the sober, solitary adults in Hopper's later work. More intimations of the artist's future preoccupations, particularly with light and line, can be found in the other pictures on display in "Early Nautical Scenes." In the 1897 oil "Old Ice Pond at Nyack," the 15-year-old Hopper carefully reproduces a garish streak of sun in a dusky sky and the ripples of dimming light it spreads on the pond's snowy shore. This painting could never be confused with a mature Hopper canvas, but the unblinking audacity of the artist's vision is already there in that bright horizontal slash of yellow. Three years later, as Hopper was beginning his formal art studies in New York, he drew "Harbor View." An accomplished, carefully hatched pen-and-ink image on paper showing Nyack's lively harbor, with choppy waves, scudding clouds, sailboats of varying sizes and a tug carrying the town's name on its stern, the drawing demonstrates the crisp, commanding line that later energized the masterly etchings Hopper made in the teens and 1920s. And "Yachting Scene," a five-inch-high watercolor of sailboats on the Hudson from around 1905, is suffused with the blues and whites that reappeared throughout his career in white buildings positioned against blue skies. The view, we learn, was probably taken from the window of Hopper's second-floor bedroom - the cloud-shadowed hills beyond the water are Westchester's, and if you know to look for it, you can just make out the then-new, now-demolished General Motors assembly plant in North Tarrytown (since renamed Sleepy Hollow). Looking out that window today, you might not necessarily term the scene "Hopperesque." But as this pithy show makes clear, you'd be wrong. "Edward Hopper: Early Nautical Scenes," Edward Hopper House Art Center, 82 North Broadway, Nyack, through Oct. 14. Information: (845) 358-0774 or edwardhopperhouse.org.