Edward Hopper’s paintings suffer from the same popular misconception that plagues the poems of Robert Frost: we feel that we know them. Hopper, like Frost, is a wholesome, all-American pastoralist, unfailingly accessible to the point of warm-fuzziness and quick to register pleasing, iconic images. One might think so, but look again. It took Lionel Trilling’s famous birthday toast to uncover the terrifying poet beneath Frost’s New England farmer façade. The Nation- al Gallery’s Hopper retrospective—which ranges from early etchings and watercolors to Hopper’s famous Chop Suey (1929) and Nighthawks (1942)—shows the painter as something more than a genial realist. His attractive surfaces and inviting use of color notwithstanding, something darker and considerably lonelier ...