In this paper, I try to understand what can allow to identify an author, decrypted through his pictorial works or his writings, as anti-urban. The transcendentalist inheritance, the deleterious urban context and finally the actual content of the paintings seem to designate Edward Hopper as hostile to the city. However, the similarity of urban and rural scenes questions this analysis. The ambivalence of the work, especially in the absence of any explanation from the artist, like many texts identified as anti-urban, shows the limits of this type of interpretation. This is eventually not the work itself but its contemporary quote that makes it anti-urban.