| 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.
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]
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]
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]
Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a modern and contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The institution was originally founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
Josephine Verstille Hopper was an American painter who studied under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and won the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship. She was the wife of Edward Hopper, whom she married in 1924.
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Hotel Lobby is a 1943 oil painting on canvas by American realist painter Edward Hopper; it is held in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.
Rosalind Bengelsdorf was an American painter, art critic and educator. She is also known as Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne and as Rosalind Browne.
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Tracy Montminy, who completed early works as Elizabeth Tracy, (1911–1992) was an American artist and muralist. During the WPA's era, she painted murals in civic buildings, including murals in the library in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the fire and police building of Saugus, Massachusetts; the Milton, Massachusetts, post office; Medford, Massachusetts City Hall; the post office of Downers Grove, Illinois; and the post office in Kennebunkport, Maine, as well as others both in the U.S. and abroad. She was an art instructor at the University of Missouri and the American University of Beirut, continuing her own painting projects simultaneously with her teaching into the 1980s. Upon her death, she established a trust to create the Montminy Art Gallery in Columbia, Missouri.
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Ground Swell is a 1939 painting by American artist Edward Hopper which depicts five people on a heeling catboat in a light swell, looking at an ominous buoy. It was in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1943 until it was purchased by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2014.
Tornado over Kansas, or simply The Tornado, is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by the American Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. It depicts a dramatic scene in which a family races for shelter as a tornado approaches their farm, and has compositional connections to Curry's earlier 1928 painting Baptism in Kansas. The artist is believed to have been influenced by Baroque art and photographs of tornadoes. He developed a fear of natural disasters and a reverence towards God during his childhood, both of which are apparent in the painting.
My Egypt is a 1927 painting by the American artist Charles Demuth. It depicts a grain elevator from the artist's hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and is considered a "masterpiece" and "emblem" of the Precisionist art movement.
New Deal artwork is an umbrella term used to describe the creative output organized and funded by the Roosevelt administration's New Deal response to the Great Depression. This work produced between 1933 and 1942 ranges in content and form from Dorothea Lange's photographs for the Farm Security Administration to the Coit Tower murals to the library-etiquette posters from the Federal Art Project to the architecture of the Solomon Courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee. The New Deal sought to "democratize the arts" and is credited with creating a "great body of distinguished work and fostering a national aesthetic."
Dangers of the Mail is a 1937 mural by Frank Mechau installed in the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in Washington, D.C. Commissioned by Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts, the mural is one of 25 New Deal artworks in the building. Dangers of the Mail faced criticism and objections at the time of its creation for lewdness and in the 21st century for stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans and depictions of sexualized violence causing a hostile workplace environment. Since the early 2000s, the mural has been curtained from public view and is viewable only by appointment.
Octagon House is a 1937 serialized novel by Phoebe Atwood Taylor that was distributed by the Associated Press and appeared in multiple newspapers in the United States.
Karal Ann Marling is an American cultural historian and writer. A professor emerita of the University of Minnesota, she is an American studies scholar with a special focus on the visual arts. The New York Times described her as a "keen-eyed critic of American popular culture." One book reviewer described her as a stylistic and intellectual heir to both Erma Bombeck and Tom Wolfe.
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