The works produced by Hector Hoppin and partner Tony Gross are studied today due to their artistry and as a reflection of the times in which they were created.

He was the only child of Dorothy Woodville Rockhill and Dr. Joseph Clark Hoppin (1870–1925), who was a highly regarded archeologist, who taught at Bryn Mawr.

His paternal grandfather, Dr. Courtland Hoppin (1834–1876), for whom he was named, was one of twelve children born into a prominent and talented Providence, Rhode Island family.

In about 1892, Mary Frances Clark Hoppin built a much larger house on Deerfield Road, at the southwestern end of her father's property, next to her sister-in-law.

[4][5] While living in Paris in the 1930s, Hoppin collaborated on several animated films with print-maker and painter Anthony Gross, providing his skill as an artist and photographer as well as the capital for the projects.

La Joie de Vivre is described as a break from the "limiting comic tradition of the 1930s cartoon animation", and its free, decorative style and vague politics permitted its re-release in France during the early 1940s by the Vichy government.

[7]The nine-minute film is described in the Internet Movie Database[8] as "A tone poem [in which] two woodland sprites dance about, atop power lines and among flowers and leaves, while being pursued.

"[11] In 1938, Hoppin and Gross began their most ambitious work, Around the World in Eighty Days, a color feature based on the Jules Verne novel financed by Alexander Korda of London Films.