House by the Railroad is an oil painting that Edward Hopper made in 1925. It shows a tall Victorian mansion, gray under a mansard roof and crowned by a square tower, standing alone on a bank just behind a railroad line. No person, tree or train appears, and every window is dark.
The canvas is famous for two reasons. In 1930 it became the first painting ever owned by New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it still hangs. Then, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock said it had inspired the Bates house, the dark mansion on the hill in his film Psycho.
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What does House by the Railroad show?
Hopper set a tall old house on a bank in the late afternoon light, ran a railroad so close beneath it that the rails seem to slice through its base, and then left out the one thing a railroad promises…
What You'll Discover
What Hopper changed in the real house
Which job he walked away from that year
The girl who saw a man painting across the road
What Hitchcock said in 1960, and what he said later
Who gave the canvas to the museum
Where the film's house stands today