Artist: Edward Hopper
Date: 1943
Size: 74 x 112 cm
Museum: Delaware Art Museum (United States)
Technique: Oil On Canvas
Summertime conveys the feeling of a sweltering day in New York City. The curtain on the window seems set in motion by an interior fan, emphasizing the lack of air. The strong verticals and horizontals of the architecture and sidewalk, based on preparatory drawings of a particular building Hopper later altered in the finished painting, give the illusion of space horizontally and vertically extended beyond the picture plane. A solitary female figure in a clinging dress, based on preparatory drawings of the artist’s wife, Jo, creates a counterpoint to the compositional, almost abstract, starkness of the background architecture and the play of light and cast shadows. Hopper’s artistic manipulation of the scene to convey a mood of eerie loneliness within the formally balanced backdrop of an impersonal city block is most readily evident in the lack of eye pupils and the incorrectly formed shadow of the female figure. Devoid of any specific narrative, the painting as a whole projects the vast emptiness of modern urban existence. (courtesy of Delaware Art Museum)
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