Passage III

Edward Hopper: The Artist Who Painted Light

The American realist painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) loved light, in the 1920s, Hopper painted pictures of cities and New England coastal regions in which he captured varieties and intensities of light ranging from brilliant afternoons to dusks to sinister nights. (32)

Hopper once stated that human figures interested him less than the light in a scene he believed light was the dramatic element that conveyed vitality and immediacy in a painting. “What I really want to do,” he said, “is to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” In his Sun in an Empty Room (1963), light coming from a single window creates large rectangles that seems to inhabit the room. The light itself, takes on as much presence a human figure might. Light also seems to become a character in Rooms by the Sea (1951). From an open door facing the sea, which intense light pours into a hotel room.

In Nighthawks, Hopper’s best-known painting, the viewer takes on the role of an outsider looking through a window into a well-lighted diner. The artificial light that shines down on three customers and a waiter, sets off the dark world outside. (39)

Sunlight attracts human figures in many of Hopper’s paintings. In Cape Cod Morning, a woman bending forward from the waist seems to embrace the light outside her bay window. In other paintings people sit in light streaming through restaurant or hotel windows. Perhaps the artistic rendering of colored matter on canvas that best depicts a person experiencing light is Morning Sun. A woman, with legs drawn up sits on a bed facing an open window. Her expression of concentration on the light conveys a feeling of absolute serenity.

At the age of eighty-three, just two years before he died, Hopper pointed Two Comedians, but it depicts a male and female clown on a stage, figures that represent him and his wife. Hopper couldn’t resist showing the clowns portraying the two of them.