Gretchen Dow Simpson, an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose moody, highly geometric images of seaside cottages, snow-covered farms and other totems of New England life drew comparisons to Edward Hopper and graced the covers of 58 issues of The New Yorker, died on April 11 at her home in Providence, R.I. She was 85.

The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, her daughter Megan Wolff said.

Ms. Simpson was best known for her meditative images of the seaside and country architecture of the Northeastern seaboard — “those rather Protestant exteriors and interiors that Edward Hopper was so taken with,” Carl Little wrote in 1997 in reviewing a Manhattan exhibition of her work for Art in America.

While modest, solitary buildings were often her subject matter, Ms. Simpson’s work was not purely representational. A former commercial photographer, she applied a telephoto approach to many of her paintings, zooming in on windows, doorways or rooftops to emphasize the juxtaposed angles and intersecting lines that characterized her work, giving it the feel of abstract art.

A New Yorker cover by Ms. Simpson from 1993, her last year with the magazine.Credit…Gretchen Dow Simpson & The New Yorker

As ARTnews noted in a 1995 review of an exhibition of her paintings, Ms. Simpson’s “emphasis on the solid geometry of the buildings as well as the planar geometry of surface decoration is further enlivened by the strong contrasts of light and shadow.”

Her style became so recognizable that in 1993, Absolut Vodka included it in its celebrated series of print advertisements featuring the distinctive shape of its bottle in a series of playful themes, like the work of Andy Warhol or the sparkling swimming pools of Los Angeles. The “Absolut Dow Simpson” ad, which fittingly ran on the back cover of The New Yorker, featured a haunting late-afternoon shadow in the shape of the bottle, cast upon a white clapboard wall.