Avery Hopwood as Depicted by Florine Stettheimer

In 1915, influential American artist Florine Stettheimer painted Avery Hopwood. The portrait depicts Hopwood standing in front of a sign for his play, "Fair and Warmer." 

This large-scale and gorgeous portrait presides over the Hopwood Room to this day, as it has since 1944 (in its current setting since 1950, when Professor Cowden moved us here to the first floor of Angell Hall). If you'd like to visit the portrait, please come by the Hopwood Room to take a look for yourself!

For more on the history of how this portrait came to live in Ann Arbor, you can read this LSA Magazine article from the fall of 1989.

This was not the only time Stettheimer depicted her friend in a major work of hers; she also included him in ensemble paintings that give a sense of the intellectual and artistic circles Stettheimer and Hopwood traveled in, such as 1917's La Fête à Duchamp (Duchamp's Party), 1920's Asbury Park South, and Soiree or Studio Party (pictured here, to the left), painted between 1917-1919.

Studio Party depicts a salon like one of many that Stettheimer commonly held in her Bryant Park studio, which "doubled as the Jazz Age’s most idiosyncratic, and by many accounts, fruitful, salon," according to Alexxa Gotthardt's "The Women Who Built the New York Art World." It would not have been a surprise to see Avery Hopwood at one of these soirees of New York's intellectual and artistic elite. In this painting, Hopwood is featured (in yellow) talking with Leo Stein, who appears to have taken out his hearing aids — perhaps Stettheimer's joke (either a joke at Hopwood's or Stein's expense) about Stein's level of interest in having a two-sided conversation.