Have a look at the artist, Edward Hopper
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Hopper = Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (born July 22, 1882, Nyack, N.Y., U.S.—died May 15, 1967, New York City) was an American painter whose realistic depictions of everyday urban scenes shock the viewer into recognition of the strangeness of familiar surroundings. He strongly influenced the Pop art and New Realist painters of the 1960s and 1970s.
Hopper was initially trained as an illustrator, but, between 1901 and 1906, he studied painting under Robert Henri, a member of a group of painters called the Ashcan School. Hopper travelled to Europe three times between 1906 and 1910, but he remained untouched by the experimental work then blossoming in France and continued throughout his career to follow his own artistic course. Although he exhibited paintings in the Armory Show of 1913, he devoted most of his time to advertising art and illustrative etchings until 1924. He then began to do such watercolours as Model Reading (1925), as well as oil paintings. Like the painters of the Ashcan School, Hopper painted the commonplaces of urban life. But, unlike their loosely organized, vivacious paintings, his House by the Railroad (1925) and Room in Brooklyn (1932) show still, anonymous figures and stern geometric forms within snapshot-like compositions that create an inescapable sense of loneliness. This isolation of his subjects was heightened by Hopper’s characteristic use of light to insulate persons and objects in space, whether in the harsh morning light (Early Sunday Morning, 1930) or the eerie light of an all-night coffee stand (Nighthawks, 1942).
Hopper’s mature style was already formed by the mid-1920s. His subsequent development showed a constant refinement of his vision. Such late paintings as Second-Story Sunlight (1960) are distinguished by extremely subtle spatial relationships and an even greater mastery of light than is seen in his work of the 1920s.
https://rhodescontemporaryart.com/news/346-the-story-behind-edward-hoppers-nighthawks/ =
The story behind Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks'
‘Nighthawks’ is often read as an exploration of human existentialism and loneliness in the modern age.
The figures feel distant and disconnected from each other which is reflected by the viewer's literal distance from the interior scene which is separated by a bending glass exterior with no clear entrance. Although Hopper has said the painting does not specifically explore loneliness, he said of the work, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
- https://whitney.org/collection/works/46345 =
Edward Hopper
Early Sunday Morning
1930
Early Sunday Morning is one of Edward Hopper’s most iconic paintings. Although he described this work as "almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue," Hopper reduced the New York City street to bare essentials. The lettering in the window signs is illegible, architectural ornament is loosely sketched, and human presence is merely suggested by the various curtains differentiating discrete apartments. The long, early morning shadows in the painting would never appear on a north-south street such as Seventh Avenue. Yet these very contrasts of light and shadow, and the succession of verticals and horizontals, create the charged, almost theatrical, atmosphere of empty buildings on an unpopulated street at the beginning of the day. Although Hopper is known as a quintessential twentieth-century American realist, and his paintings are fundamentally representational, this work demonstrates his emphasis on simplified forms, painterly surfaces, and studiously constructed compositions.
Visual Description
Above all the buildings is a strip of blue sky, darker blue on the left, becoming lighter and tinged with yellow toward the right side of the painting. Below the buildings is a sidewalk, a curb, and a thin slice of the street. The sidewalk, curb, and street also run from one edge of the painting to the other.
The buildings are in New York City, but Hopper leaves out details like street signs. So it could be any Main Street, in any small town in the United States, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. There’s nothing living or natural in this painting. No people, pets, birds, flowers or trees, though there are hints of human activity in the apartment windows above the stores. And the sunlight is strong.
About a third of the way in from the left there is a fire hydrant on the sidewalk. And slightly right of center on the sidewalk there is a barber’s pole with red, white, and blue diagonal stripes. Except for the barber’s pole, there is no way to know the business of the stores. The storefront windows have lettering on them, but you can’t make out the words. The storefronts on the left and in the center are painted green and have rolled up awnings above their windows. The store on the right is painted red.
The second floor above all the stores is painted deep brick red. There are ten apartment windows, all the same size, stretching across the stores below. Some windows are open, some have yellow shades pulled down to differing lengths. Some windows have dark window coverings. A few have white curtains. In this small detail, Hopper makes us acutely aware that people are missing from the picture.
The sunlight on the buildings is very bright, and it is shining into the painting from the right. You can tell by the shadows. Both the barber’s pole and the fire hydrant cast long, dark shadows to the left, as they block the sunlight coming from the right. The length of these shadows shows that the sun is still rising and low on the horizon. It’s the sunlight and the absence of people that suggest the time is early morning and that the day of the week is Sunday, when few people are outside working or shopping.
- https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78330 =
Edward Hopper House by the Railroad 1925
A late-afternoon glow pervades Hopper’s House by the Railroad, which features a grand Victorian home, its base and grounds obscured by the tracks of a railroad. The tracks create a visual barrier that seems to block access to the house, which is isolated in an empty landscape. The juxtaposition of the house and the railroad tracks may be read as a confrontation between the fixity of tradition and the possibility of mobility in early-twentieth-century America. At the same time, these effects evoke the quiet yet charged atmosphere that would become a hallmark of this artist’s work.
Hopper produced closely observed urban views, landscapes (largely of New England), and interior scenes—all sparsely populated with figures or devoid of them entirely. Although he insisted that his paintings were straightforward representations of the real world, they are often filled with an unmistakable sense of loneliness, estrangement, stillness, and mystery. Light, whether natural or artificial, plays a central role in conjuring mood.
In 1929–30 House by the Railroad was featured in Paintings by 19 Living Americans, The Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition devoted exclusively to American art. It was acquired by MoMA in 1930, one of the first works to enter the Museum’s collection.
- https://www.artsy.net/artwork/edward-hopper-room-in-brooklyn =
Edward Hopper defined 20th-century realism with austere, eerie scenes that convey the isolation of modern life. He infused his paintings of spare architecture, desolate interiors, coastal views, and cityscapes with an appreciation of light and shade that contributes to a significant sense of alienation. In Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks (1942), three customers sit at the counter of a well-lit diner while the streets outside remain dark and empty. After the artist received his first solo exhibition in 1920 at the recently opened Whitney Studio Club (a precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art), he gained commercial and curatorial renown. In 1952, Hopper represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. His work has been acquired by such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art; on the secondary market, Hopper’s paintings have sold for multimillion-dollar prices.
- https://www.wikiart.org/en/edward-hopper =
No other artist managed to capture the solitude within the modern city
like Edward Hopper. The ‘artist of empty spaces’ offers a remindful look
at life of Americans during Great Depression. His suggestive imagery
shares the mood of individual’s isolation with books of Tennessee
Williams, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Jerome Salinger, as well as
with canvasses of Giorgio De Chirico and Paul Delvaux.
Hopper depicted the spirit of the time very subtly, showing it in the
poses of characters, in the vast empty spaces around them, and also in
his unique color palette.
- https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/edward-hopper.html#slide_11 =
Edward Hopper
Although Hopper regularly visited New England, Greenwich Village (where he lived in the same apartment from 1913 until his death in 1967) was home, and New York set the stage for many of his most iconic paintings. Just as he in New England shunned dominant artistic motifs, Hopper disregarded many Jazz Age subjects—soaring skyscrapers, bustling streets, and industrial machinery—favored by American modernists. Indeed, Hopper's New York is at once instantly recognizable and strangely unfamiliar: streets are devoid of pedestrians, stores are without customers, and even automats—modern restaurants in which coin-operated, food-dispensing machines replaced waiters—lack signs of anything automatic. And though New York architecture rose to great new heights, Hopper favored instead a horizontal compositional format more closely linked to landscape traditions. He also avoided signs of the grit, noise, and commotion of urban life, imbuing his portrayals of the city with an overwhelming silence and disquieting stillness.
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