Early Sunday Morning

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.

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".{{cite book |last1=Levin |first1=Gail |title=Edward Hopper: An intimate biography |date=1995 |publisher=Knopf |location=New York}}

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.{{cite book |last1=Miller |first1=Dana |title=Whitney Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collection |date=2015 |publisher=Yale University Press |location=New Haven and London |isbn=9780300211832}}

It is currently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.{{cite web|url=http://whitney.org/Collection/EdwardHopper/31426|title=Whitney.org|access-date=2011-10-17|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110618022423/http://whitney.org/Collection/EdwardHopper/31426|archive-date=2011-06-18|url-status=dead}}{{cite web|url=http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper/earlysun.jpg.html|title=Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning|website=www.artchive.com}}{{cite web|url=http://www.davidrumsey.com/amica/amico169867-123922.html|title=Edward Hopper / Early Sunday Morning / (1930)|website=www.davidrumsey.com}}{{cite web|url=http://www.gale.cengage.com/pdf/samples/sp65916.pdf|title=Gale.cengage.com|publisher=}}

The piece was originally sold to the Whitney for $2,000.{{cite web|url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/hopper-156346356/|title=Hopper: the Supreme American Realist of the 20th Century|website=www.smithsonianmag.com}} 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.

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".{{cite journal |last1=Marling |first1=Karal Ann |title=Early Sunday Morning |journal=Smithsonian Studies in American Art |date=1988 |volume=2 |issue=3 |pages=22–53|doi=10.1086/smitstudamerart.2.3.3108956 |s2cid=191620492 }} 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."{{Cite web|url=https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/whitney-hoppers-sunday-morning-politics-culture-294441|title=At the Whitney, Hopper's 'Sunday Morning'|date=5 May 2015}} The painting has become the inspiration for other works of art. Examples include Byron Vazakas' poem Early Sunday Morning{{cite journal |last1=Vazakas |first1=Bryon |title=Early Sunday Morning |journal=The Virginia Quarterly Review |date=1957 |volume=33 |issue=3 |page=377}} and John Stone's poem of the same name.{{cite journal |last1=Stone |first1=John |title=Early Sunday Morning |journal=The American Scholar |volume=54 |number=1 |year=1985 |pages=119–120 |jstor=41211145}}

• List of works by Edward Hopper

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• [https://web.archive.org/web/20110618022423/http://whitney.org/Collection/EdwardHopper/31426 Whitney.org]

{{Edward Hopper}}

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Category:Paintings by Edward Hopper

Category:1930 paintings

Category:Paintings in the Whitney Museum of American Art