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

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.