Morning Sun, 1952

Kirsty Bell: This painting is Morning Sun from 1952, and it's actually unusual in Hopper's interiors in that it's based on a real interior, on his own interior. 

Usually in Hopper's paintings, the interiors are kind of imagined architectures, but we know this is based on his interior space.

Narrator: Kirsty Bell.

Kirsty Bell: So the other interesting point in relation to that is that he shared his studio with his wife, Jo, and that she was also the model for all of the female figures in all of his paintings since they married in 1924. So, this went on for decades and decades. In this piece, in fact, she was sixty-eight years old when she modeled for this painting. 

Though Jo and Edward had a kind of notoriously fraught and difficult relationship—they were well known for their arguments and just had such different personalities. But I think that the one thing that did bind them together was the role that Jo played in his works. And she had in her youth studied theater. She was always very interested in drama, and I think that this role that she had of modeling for the figures in his paintings gave her an opportunity to revisit that.