Early Sunday Morning
| Early Sunday Morning | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Edward Hopper  |
| Year | 1930 |
| Medium | oil paint, canvas |
| Movement | American scene painting, social realism |
| Dimensions | 89.4 cm (35.2 in) × 153 cm (60 in) |
| Location | United States |
| Collection | Whitney Museum |
| Accession No. | 31.426 |
Early Sunday Morning is a 1930 oil painting by American artist Edward Hopper.
Description[edit]
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[edit]
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[edit]
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]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ a b "At the Whitney, Hopper's 'Sunday Morning'". 5 May 2015.
- ^ Levin, Gail (1995). Edward Hopper: An intimate biography. New York: Knopf.
- ^ a b Miller, Dana (2015). Whitney Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collection. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300211832.
- ^ "Whitney.org". Archived from the original on 2011-06-18. Retrieved 2011-10-17.
- ^ "Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning". www.artchive.com.
- ^ "Edward Hopper / Early Sunday Morning / (1930)". www.davidrumsey.com.
- ^ "Gale.cengage.com" (PDF).
- ^ "Hopper: the Supreme American Realist of the 20th Century". www.smithsonianmag.com.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Vazakas, Bryon (1957). "Early Sunday Morning". The Virginia Quarterly Review. 33 (3): 377.
- ^ Stone, John (1985). "Early Sunday Morning". The American Scholar. 54 (1): 119–120. JSTOR 41211145.
