Early Sunday Morning, 1930

Narrator: Hopper once said that Early Sunday Morning was “an almost literal translation of Seventh Avenue.” But the painting is more complex than that description might suggest.

Andrew Berman: On the one hand you have this incredibly intimate view of this diminutively scaled row of stores with what seemed to be residences above them.

Narrator: Andrew Berman is Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation. 

Andrew Berman: But you have hints of the sort of bigger city around it, that kind of peek in from the edges of the frame of the picture, most notably on the right hand side, the larger building that looms overhead, which, in a lot of ways seems to be indicative of the sort of encroaching vertical scale of the city.

The choice of it being in this kind of early morning light, I think adds a forlornness to the image, where you can't help but look at it and say, “What's going to happen to these?” Much as in many of Hopper's paintings, you look at it and you say, “What's gonna become of this person?” There's something about how you've captured them in a moment in time, but you feel a sense of the change that preceded the image and the impending change. And I feel that this really captures that in a very specific way, particularly relating to how New York was developing around 1930, the enormous boom of the 1920s was cresting, and so much of early New York was really changing or disappearing at this time.