Monday History

 

Edward Hopper

Early Sunday Morning, 1930

Oil on Canvas, 35" x 60"

Edward Hopper was best known for his painting "The Nighthawks," but it's paintings like the one above that make him one of the most important painters of his time.  "Early Sunday Morning" is just one of many paintings that Hopper did during the Great Depression that capture the mood of an era in a subtle but poignant way.  Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite Art History sites, Webmuseum.com:

"Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling, alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a Hopper picture appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art, perhaps an expression of the sense of human hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s."

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/

Whether the subject matter was figure or landscape, urban or rural, Hopper (in my opinion) was a master of capturing time and place.  Enjoy the work and investigate further.