Early Sunday Morning

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (the USA).

Canvas, oil.

Like many paintings by Hopper, this deserted urban landscape is more likely an image not of a specific New York street but any corner of America of that period. The work was created during the Depression, and this gives the concept a completely different meaning. Knowing the period, the viewer puts his attention to the empty shop windows, the announcement in the hairdresser’s window, possibly indicating that it will not open. Hopper admitted that he first depicted a man in a window on the second floor but then decided that architecture better expressed his feelings and got rid of an unnecessary witness. In the works of Hopper, there is little dynamics, but this picture is a real hymn to a time that stopped. The author said that it was “almost a literal depiction of Seventh Avenue”, but this was not necessarily Sunday. The word got into the name by chance; it was surprisingly the exact definition of almost tangible silence on a deserted street, flooded with the dawn.