Early Sunday Morning.
Painted in 1930 by Edward Hopper.
It’s an oil painting on canvas.
The dimensions are 35 inches high by 60 inches wide.
So it’s a horizontal painting that’s almost twice as wide as it is tall.
It’s in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Early Sunday Morning shows a block of three storefronts with apartments above them. The buildings are attached, two stories tall, all the same size, and they extend horizontally across the painting from the left edge to the right edge.

You are standing across the street looking at them. Above the buildings is a blue sky, darker blue on the left, becoming lighter and tinged with yellow on the right side of the painting. Below the buildings is a sidewalk, the curb, and a thin slice of the street. All three run from one edge of the painting to the other.

About a third of the way in from the right there’s a fire hydrant on the sidewalk. And slightly right of center on the sidewalk there’s a barber’s pole with red, white, and blue diagonal stripes. Except for the barber’s pole, there’s no way to know the business of the stores. The six storefront windows have lettering on them, but you can’t make out the words. Two of the storefronts are painted green and have rolled up awnings above their windows. The store on the extreme right is painted red.

When Edward Hopper made this image in 1930, he based it on a real street he knew, Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. But by leaving out specific details, he made it look like any Main Street in any small town in the United States.

There are two striking features of the painting. The first is that the block reveals nothing living or natural. No people, pets, birds, or trees. It is literally empty, except for hints of human activity in the apartments above the stores. The second floor above the stores is painted deep brick red. There are ten apartment windows, all the same size, stretching across the stores below. Some windows are open, some have yellow shades pulled down to differing lengths. Some windows have dark window coverings. A few have white curtains. Each is slightly different, hinting at a life being lived beyond our view. In this small detail, Hopper makes us acutely aware that people are missing from the picture.

The second striking feature of Early Sunday Morning is the sunlight. It’s very bright, almost harsh on the buildings. The source of the light is on your right. You can tell this by the shadows cast. Both the barber’s pole and the fire hydrant cast long, dark shadows to the left, as they block the sunlight coming from the right. Another long thin shadow on the sidewalk runs the entire width of the painting, and echoes the curb. But the object creating this shadow is not included in the painting. The length of these shadows shows that the sun is low on the horizon. This visual detail, along with the absence of people, suggests the time is early morning and the day of the week is Sunday, when fewer people are outside working or shopping.

When you first look at Early Sunday Morning, the painting’s composition seems highly balanced, stable, and symmetrical, with a regular pattern of buildings and windows. However, as you look more closely, you notice that the painting is filled with asymmetrical elements. For example, the shades in the second-story windows. They are not all the same color. And every shade is open to a different length. Also the window on the extreme right and the store below it are cut off at the edge of the painting. We assume the buildings continue on past the edge of the frame. But this kind of framing makes the painting feel a bit asymmetrical. At first we don’t notice these asymmetries because we are used to seeing photographs and movies with similar compositions. And in fact, Hopper had a keen interest in the cinema. It shows in his compositions and in the careful use of light in his paintings.

A final bit of asymmetry is at the upper right corner of the canvas. Above the last building, a small dark rectangle rises. It suggests possibly a skyscraper in the background. It doesn't catch your eye at first, but once you notice it, the idea of a tall building changes the whole picture. A threat overshadows the otherwise quiet street. Sooner or later the juggernaut of commerce and technology will eradicate the small-town way of life in 1930. In many of his paintings, Hopper explores the sense of alienation and loss created by the modern industrial age.