AMICO Sample Records
Catalog Record in Data Dictionary Format

AID	WMAA.31.426
OTY	Paintings
OTG
	OTN	Early Sunday Morning
MET	Whole - 35 3/16 x 60 1/4 in. (89.4 x 153 cm)
MET	Frame - 43 x 68 1/2 in. (109.2 x 174 cm)
OMG
	OMD	Oil on canvas
CRG
	CID	ULAN: 5313
	CRT	Edward Hopper
	CRN	Hopper, Edward
	CRC	American
	CDT	1882-1967
	CBD	1882
	CBP	Nyack, New York, United States
	CDD	1967
	CDP	New York, New York, United States
OCG
	OCT	1930
	OCS	1930
	OCE	1930
CXG
	CXD	Early Sunday Morning was acquired by the Whitney Museum within a few months of its completion, the first Edward Hopper painting to enter the Permanent Collection. It is still regarded as one of Hopper's most evocative works, a paradigm of the solemn isolation with which he imbued his city views and of the way in which he distilled, rather than recorded, his subjects. In Early Sunday Morning he copied an actual row of buildings on Seventh Avenue in New York (the work was originally titled Seventh Avenue Shops). But Hopper strove to generalize the site, avoiding the kind of topical detail embraced by contemporaries like Reginald Marsh. The lettering in the shop signs, for instance, is apparent, but unreadable. Although people are nowhere to be seen, evidence of the human presence is everywhere. In the sequence of second-story windows, identical in size, each aperture has been treated differently, as if reflecting the individuality of its occupant. Hopper initially painted a figure in one of these windows, but later painted it out. To create a dramatic play of light and shadow, Hopper took larger liberties with the original setting. The long shadow on the top of the building and the dark bands across the sidewalk suggest an impossible position for the sun on this north-south avenue. The variety of lighting on the flat, frontal row of buildings is more theatrical than real. In fact, these Seventh Avenue facades recall a theater set, designed by Jo Mielziner, for Elmer Rice's Street Scene, a play Hopper and his wife had attended the previous year. Hopper's willingness to alter the photographic truths of a site reveals a concern with form no less than with content. Indeed, Early Sunday Morning can easily be viewed as a succession of verticals and horizontals and a frieze of contrasted shadow and light. Many of the upper windows have the appearance of miniature Mark Rothko paintings. Given the fundamentally representational character of Hopper's art, it is ironic that this work is equally admired for its stark abstraction, painterly surfaces, and studiously constructed compositions. Hopper's power as the quintessential twentieth-century American realist is sustained by his mastery of formal pictorial construction.
OOG
	OON	Whitney Museum of American Art
	OOP	945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021
	OOA	31.426
	OOC	Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
ORG
	ORL	http://www.whitney.org/information/rights.shtml
RIG
	RIP	Y
	RID	Full view
	RIR	HasVersion
	RIL	WMAA.31_426.tif
RDG
	RDD	Sims, Patterson. Whitney Museum of American Art: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection. New York, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985 p.77.
	RDR	IsReferencedBy
AVD	20000323
AVV	1.2
ALY	1999

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