Books like Edward Hopper

I have had this book for many years--beautifully reproduced pictures of the works, a number of which fold out to display the paintings in a larger format. There are also studies and drawings, illustrating how Hopper assembled his big paintings. We always thinks paintings are just made as we see them, but just as few novelists simply write their books from beginning to end, but make drafts and sketches, so Hopper assembled his paintings, perhaps sketching a bit of one house here, one house there, elements of the landscapes, a figure's possible poses there, and then brought them together in a unified composition. As is the case with the Leonard Bernstein coffee-table book I reviewed here once, The Private World of Leonard Bernstein, I often have art books for years before I actually read the text, and as in that case, the text here is incredibly informative. As to the issue of loneliness in his pictures--what I'm getting by reading this book was that was not something that was particularly conscious with Hopper. He saw the quiet and Americanism, the unique beauty of the ordinary moment, and the more ordinary the better, often the liminal, boring moments of waiting which he saw as beautiful. He railed against the influence of other nations' work on American art, felt there was such a thing as national character, and it was important to work out of one's own national character to build a new, authentic art. American art was hugely affected by French impressionism in Hopper's era--not a bad thing, kind of a palate cleanser for a rigid and stuffy environment to my mind--but that it was important to express what was unique about the American soul or character, to the point that the sensuality of the materials, paint and brush, stroke and thickness and gloss, eventually flattened out in Hopper. He wasn't interested in paint. He was interested in conveying the emotion of the subject, and stripped away everything that distracted him from it.The other thing that I strongly related to was how he was never satisfied with his work. As Martha Graham once described it, he had divine dissatisfaction. He always despaired that the quality he wanted to portray was always distorted by the forms and demands of the painting itself that he saw as 'intruding' on his initial vision. He wanted to paint the painting in his mind, but the actual painting always took over, and left him feeling frustrated. And so he would try again. This is the engine that fuels many, many artists and I recognized it well.Was Hopper lonely? Or was it something he perceived in the American soul? Or perhaps we see moments of quiet and introspection as lonely because we live in an extroverted time which fails to understand the attraction? Lots of questions here.I hadn't realized that Hopper was the student of the influential American art teacher Robert Henri, a leading figure of the Ashcan School and author of one of my most treasured books, The Art Spirit, about the making of artists.