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Edward Hopper

A Woman in the Sun
1961

On view
Floor 7

Date
1961

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on linen

Dimensions
Overall: 40 1/8 × 60 3/16in. (101.9 × 152.9 cm) Frame: 43 1/16 × 63 1/16 × 2 11/16in. (109.4 × 160.2 × 6.8 cm)

Accession number
84.31

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 50th Anniversary Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Hackett in honor of Edith and Lloyd Goodrich

Rights and reproductions
© Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/1337

As Edward Hopper matured he left more and more visual detail out of his paintings and focused on the psychological reality of his subjects. In A Woman in the Sun, a nude female stands in a shaft of raking light from a nearby window. The room has been reduced to its simplest architectural components. The few judicious details that remain—a pair of black pumps, the turned wood bedposts, and the vaguely delineated painting on the wall—only accentuate the barrenness of the scene and the figure. The voyeuristic, almost cinematic setting suggests a narrative, enticing the viewer to imagine the events that may have occurred prior to the scene we now view, and what will happen next. Hopper’s wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, served as the model for this figure as she did for many of the women who appeared in his paintings. She was seventy-eight at the time of this painting, but Hopper transformed her, like the rest of the scene, according to his own internal vision rather than faithfully adhering to realistic detail.




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