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Hoppin, Joseph Clark

    Full Name: Hoppin, Joseph Clark

    Gender: male

    Date Born: 1870

    Date Died: 1925

    Place Born: Providence, RI, USA

    Place Died: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

    Home Country/ies: United States

    Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, ceramic ware (visual works), Greek pottery styles, and pottery (visual works)

    Career(s): art collectors


    Overview

    Archaeologist, historian of Greek classical vases, and collector. Hoppin graduated from Harvard University in 1893 and studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the universities in Berlin and Munich, receiving his Ph. D., at the latter in 1896. Hoppin’s interest was from the first and throughout his career in classical Greek vases; his dissertation was on the vase painter Euthymides. Between 1894-1896 he was a participant in the archaeological dig at Argive Heraeum, Athens, under Charles Waldstein whose finds Hoppin published in 1898. That same year he joined Wellesley College as an instructor. The following year he moved to Bryn Mawr as an Associate in Greek Art and Archaeology. In 1901 he was appointed associate professor. He resigned in 1904, teaching at the American School in Athens for the 1904-05 year. In 1910, he and Richard Norton among others excavated the former Greco-Roman outpost Cyrene in North Africa (modern Libya). In 1916 he revised and published his dissertation in English. He returned to teaching at Bryn Mawr for the 1917-1919 years. Two handbooks of Greek vases appeared in 1918 and 1924. He and A. E. Gallatin co-published the first fascicule of the prestigious Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum for a United States collection, which appeared after his death. The Greek vase artist, the Hoppin Painter, is named for a vase formerly in Hoppin’s collection now in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University.


    Selected Bibliography

    and Gallatin, Albert. Corpus vasorum antiquorum. United States of America (fasc 1:). Hoppin and Gallatin collections. Paris: Champion, 1926; Euthymides and his Fellows. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1917; A Handbook of Attic Red-figured Vases signed by or Attributed to the Various Masters of the Sixth and Fifth Centuries B. C. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919; A Handbook of Greek Black-figured Vases, with a Chapter on the Red Figured Southern Italian Vases. Paris: E. Champion, 1924.


    Sources

    [obituaries:] G[eorge] H[enry] C[hase]. “Joseph Clark Hoppin 1870-1925.” American Journal of Archaeology 29, No. 1 (January1925): 1-2; “Dr. Joseph C. Hoppin Dies: Noted Archaeologist was an Authority on Greek Vases.” New York Times February 1, 1925, p. E7.




    Citation

    "Hoppin, Joseph Clark." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hoppinj/.


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