Edward Hopper

A Woman in the Sun
1961

A nude white woman stands in a bluish bedroom and looks out a window as she holds a cigarette.

As Edward Hopper matured he left more and more visual detail out of his paintings and focused on the psychological reality of his subjects. In A Woman in the Sun, a nude female stands in a shaft of raking light from a nearby window. The room has been reduced to its simplest architectural components. The few judicious details that remain—a pair of black pumps, the turned wood bedposts, and the vaguely delineated painting on the wall—only accentuate the barrenness of the scene and the figure. The voyeuristic, almost cinematic setting suggests a narrative, enticing the viewer to imagine the events that may have occurred prior to the scene we now view, and what will happen next. Hopper’s wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, served as the model for this figure as she did for many of the women who appeared in his paintings. She was seventy-eight at the time of this painting, but Hopper transformed her, like the rest of the scene, according to his own internal vision rather than faithfully adhering to realistic detail.

On view
Floor 7

Date
1961

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on linen

Dimensions
Overall: 40 1/8 × 60 3/16in. (101.9 × 152.9 cm) Frame: 43 1/16 × 63 1/16 × 2 11/16in. (109.4 × 160.2 × 6.8 cm)

Accession number
84.31

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 50th Anniversary Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Hackett in honor of Edith and Lloyd Goodrich

Rights and reproductions
© Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/1337

Audio

Edward Hopper, Morning in a City, 1944, and A Woman in the Sun, 1961

In Hopper Drawing

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Edward Hopper, Morning in a City, 1944, and A Woman in the Sun, 1961

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Carter Foster: These two paintings, A Woman in the Sun from 1961 and Morning in a City from 1944 were done decades apart, but they are similar in many ways. And when hung together, we see how they seem to function as pendants, or almost like a series, where one is answering the other.
Narrator: The young woman in Morning in a City gazes out of a window onto an urban landscape, in a pose that recalls classical sculpture. She seems innocent in comparison to the older figure we see in A Woman in the Sun, unflatteringly described by Hopper to his wife Jo as a “wise tramp.”
Carter Foster: It's very interesting because the curtain billowing in, in A Woman in the Sun, pushed in by the air, is almost a continuation of the curtain in the earlier painting, Morning in a City.
We hang them together here to show how carefully Hopper thought of his paintings in tandem and how drawings probably played a function as the connective tissue when he's working the same theme across decades because Hopper would not have had this painting to refer to, the earlier painting, Morning in the City, when he was painting, A Woman in the Sun. But he did have the drawings that he made for that painting.