Early Sunday Morning
ArtistEdward Hopper Edit this on Wikidata
Year1930
Mediumoil paint, canvas
MovementAmerican scene painting, social realism Edit this on Wikidata
Dimensions89.4 cm (35.2 in) × 153 cm (60 in)
LocationUnited States
CollectionWhitney Museum Edit this on Wikidata
Accession No.31.426 Edit this on Wikidata

Early Sunday Morning is a 1930 oil painting by American artist Edward Hopper.

Description

The painting portrays the small businesses and shops of Seventh Avenue in New York City shortly after sunrise. It shows a cloudless sky over a long, red building. A red and blue striped barber pole sits in front of one of the doorways on the right side of the sidewalk, and a green fire hydrant is on the left. The bleak, empty street and storefronts are said to be a representation of the dire state of the city during the Great Depression.[1]

Despite the title, Hopper has said that the painting was not necessarily based on a Sunday view. The painting was originally titled Seventh Avenue Shops. The addition of "Sunday" to the title was "tacked on by someone else".[2]

The image was based on a building nearby Hopper's studio. It is said to be "almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue"; however, a few minor details were changed, like decreasing the size of the doorways and making the lettering on the storefronts less clear.[3]

Provenance

It is currently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.[4][5][6][7]

The piece was originally sold to the Whitney for $2,000.[8] It was purchased with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney just a few months after it was painted, and would go on to become a part of the Whitney's founding collection.[3]

Critical response

Scholar Karal Ann Marling notes that Edward Hopper's work "is a prelude to the wakeful coffee urns and to those who tend them to defeat the night".[9] According to the American art critic Blake Gopnik, "The painting’s bone-deep conservatism, and its obvious, almost polemical resistance to the most ambitious European art of its day. In the midst of the depression in America, that conservatism is as much a part of the painting’s subject as the closed shops it depicts."[1] The painting has become the inspiration for other works of art. Examples include Byron Vazakas' poem Early Sunday Morning[10] and John Stone's poem of the same name.[11]

References

  1. 1 2 "At the Whitney, Hopper's 'Sunday Morning'". 5 May 2015.
  2. ↑ Levin, Gail (1995). Edward Hopper: An intimate biography. New York: Knopf.
  3. 1 2 Miller, Dana (2015). Whitney Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collection. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300211832.
  4. ↑ "Whitney.org". Archived from the original on 2011-06-18. Retrieved 2011-10-17.
  5. ↑ "Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning". www.artchive.com.
  6. ↑ "Edward Hopper / Early Sunday Morning / (1930)". www.davidrumsey.com.
  7. ↑ "Gale.cengage.com" (PDF).
  8. ↑ "Hopper: the Supreme American Realist of the 20th Century". www.smithsonianmag.com.
  9. ↑ Marling, Karal Ann (1988). "Early Sunday Morning". Smithsonian Studies in American Art. 2 (3): 22–53. doi:10.1086/smitstudamerart.2.3.3108956. S2CID 191620492.
  10. ↑ Vazakas, Bryon (1957). "Early Sunday Morning". The Virginia Quarterly Review. 33 (3): 377.
  11. ↑ Stone, John (1985). "Early Sunday Morning". The American Scholar. 54 (1): 119–120. JSTOR 41211145.
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