Jo Hopper left the Whitney more than 3,000 Edward Hopper works in 1968; a critic alleges a Nyack minister who shared the residue took hundreds more, and the museum has declined to pursue it

Edward Hopper left his estate to his wife Jo. When she died in 1968 her will gave nearly all his work to the Whitney Museum, which received more than 3,000 works, the largest single gift in its history. She named the Rev. Arthayer Sanborn, a Baptist minister in Nyack, as one of six beneficiaries to share the rest. Baruch College art historian Gail Levin alleges that Sanborn, who died in 2007, took hundreds of Hopper works from the family home in Nyack in the 1960s, and puts the number near 1,000. The New York Times identified more than 300 works once owned by Sanborn in 2022. Sanborn said many were gifts from the family, including from Hopper's sister Marion, who died in 1965. His daughter Ann Bach said, "A lot of it was verbal." Levin says no record shows Marion was authorized to give art away. The Whitney fired Levin in 1984 and has declined to pursue her claims. In 2017 it opened a Sanborn Hopper Archive after a family gift of about 4,000 objects. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bought a circa 1903 Hopper self-portrait for $27,500 in the 1970s^†; its curator calls the evidence of theft inconclusive. These are allegations. No court has ruled.