Sun in an Empty Room by Edward Hopper

War and technology brought rapid change to the Victorian world, ushering in a more alienated society. Traditional roles shattered; the rigidity that held life together began to fade. Artists depicted the wake of the 19th century. Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room allows the viewer into his experience of the post-Victorian social rift in America. It conveys Hopper’s attempt to reconcile the cultures of his lifetime. The work leans toward abstraction, reducing his world to its simplest form (light) and his earliest experience (his childhood room). Hopper draws on the simplicity beneath modern isolation, exuding vulnerability. 

A striking contrast from Hopper’s previous works, Sun portrays a space occupied by shadow and light in place of buildings or figures. “In [Hopper’s] painting, light directs the gaze … of the observer.” On the left, a short rectangle of light is cut off by the edge of the painting. Following the viewer’s gaze to the right, shading conveys depth in the wall. A corner casts a shadow on the floor below. At an abrupt turn, light strikes the protruding wall to form a taller, brighter rectangle. In the far right of the image, a window stretches toward the foreground. Hopper emphasizes color in its relation to light. A flaxen tone dominates the work, implying a sense of daylight despite the dark view outside the window. Darker forms contain red, blue, and green, contrasting with the bright yellow of direct light. Brushstrokes are visible in the shading. The material-like subjects of light and shadow transcend other elements of the work. As opposed to his paintings featuring material forms, Hopper nears abstraction in his progression to a focus on form, line, and light.  “Like Hopper’s most arresting images, [this] scene seems to be realistic, abstract, and surrealistic all at once.”

Born in America in 1882, Hopper faced a period of rapid technological and social change. “[Hopper’s] childhood spanned the end of the Victorian age and the dawn of the new century, with its momentous disruptions and displacements.” In his hometown of Nyack, the Hopper family home overlooked the Hudson River and continued to appear in Hopper's paintings long after he moved away. In the early 1900s, Hopper began commuting to Manhattan to take classes “at the New York School of Art, beginning with advertising illustration and then studying art under Robert Henri,” who linked him to the realist Ashcan School. “Like the painters of the Ashcan School, Hopper painted the commonplaces of urban life.” Continuing his studies, Hopper traveled to Paris, where he encountered “the works of Picasso and the Fauvist painters.” Much of Hopper’s personal style developed during his sojourn in Paris. “What Hopper saw usually became more important for him than whom he met or what he did.” Whether observing French architecture, landscapes, or artwork, Hopper spent his time “working with his eyes.” Hopper’s time spent outdoors echoed the methods of the impressionists, while his architectural studies built on the French avant-garde style of cubism. Though he admired painters such as Courbet, Manet, and Marquet, he later struggled to “rid himself of [their] influence and … to establish an American ‘aesthetic consciousness.’”

From the 1940s to 1960s, “an era marked by the ascendancy of abstract painting, he remained a staunch realist,” rejecting the abstract style of many of his contemporaries. Hopper’s association with France provoked criticism from his American audience, further alienating him. His aversion to the sudden reform in art may have stemmed from the contradictory cultures of his childhood and young adulthood. “The compelling tension of his life, then, was between the Victorian-inspired world of his childhood and the uncertain modern world that intruded on him daily. This led him to produce pictures that seem emblematic of 20th-century America.” “In his last decades, Hopper found his best inspiration outside New York—on the West Coast or in transit.” The most influential periods of his life rested on the space between destinations. Much of his creativity sprung from time spent commuting on the train, taking road trips with his wife, Josephine Hopper, or looking through windows into the lives of those around him. Josephine’s painting also inspired his art throughout their lives. As he aged, Hopper’s view expanded. By the end of his career, “Hopper had distilled his artistic vision down to light itself,” embracing the abstraction he had rejected in his youth. 

Sun is one of Hopper’s only works to place the viewer inside the scene of reference rather than outside, looking through a window. The lack of a figure or material possessions points to Hopper as the topic of the work. “When asked about the subject of the painting, Hopper responded, ‘I’m after me.’” The divide between Hopper’s inner experience and the world around him is evident in his portrayals of urban isolation. The window, a prevailing image in Hopper’s canon, often serves to separate his two ‘worlds.’ As his art developed, “the window became one of Hopper’s most enduring symbols … he exploited its potential to merge the urban facades that had long fascinated him with views into the private lives lived within.” 

Hopper sought a link between the era he was born into and his rapidly changing modern world. In trying to make sense of societal shifts, Hopper distilled his surroundings into their simplest forms. In the painting, the light is a distilled impression of the world beyond the window. By inhibiting the view through the window, Hopper draws his viewers’ attention to the unseen light source. Light becomes material in the piece, with the depth and definition of a physical object. Yet, the room is ‘emptied out,’ forcing the viewer to trace the movement of the nearly tangible substance of light to its source or to the artist himself. 

The Victorian era was a time of idealism and a clear moral standard in both England and America. As industrialization expanded the economy, disillusionment succeeding the two World Wars loosened American societal values. Hopper’s work reflects the alienation and uncertainty that accompanied modernization. He painted Sun in 1963, four years before his death at age 84. In later life, he often returned to his hometown to visit his sister in the family home. The painting, like many of his other works, resembles his childhood bedroom in Nyack. Hopper had come full circle in his final works. He portrayed the vacancy of a home previously full of life, illustrating his loss of youth and the culture of his childhood. His style returned to a childlike simplicity reminiscent of impressionism and much like the works he encountered in France. Hopper claimed that he was always an impressionist. Compared with his realist style, such a statement seems ironic. 

However, Sun is undeniably an impression of his distinctive view of the world. In the absence of people, possessions, and a narrative, all that remains is light and line. “For his part, Hopper never really went for abstraction, but his works became increasingly planar, culminating in Sun In An Empty Room in which a room … has been cleared of everything but light.” Hopper’s interest in light suggests a desire for an answer to resolve the vanishing of an older way of life. “I guess I’m not very human,” he confessed, “All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.” Yet, the need for an answer to bewildering societal shifts is intrinsically human. His work examines the humanity beneath the isolated, industrialized America of the 1900s. As Hopper himself stated, “All the answers are on the canvas. The man’s the work. Something doesn’t come out of nothing.”

Sun in an Empty Room is an impression of Hopper’s inner world expressed in terms of his surroundings; it represents his search for meaning in the isolation of his modern America. Through the progression of his art, Hopper examined the hollowed-out relationship between Americans. By painting his surroundings, he presented the question of how society came to renounce the ideals of the past. He rarely painted himself, but was the true subject of his pieces, seeking his place between two contradictory cultures. His work is both an extensive critique of 20th-century America and an examination of his role in society. Hopper elucidated the meaning of his artwork, expressing,  “They talk about me. The picture is my inner, an immense floating ocean, a self-portrait in search of himself.” In Sun, Hopper conveys vulnerability in his pursuit of reconciliation. He may never have reconciled the different periods of his life, but he made peace with his loss by returning to the simplicity of the past.