Early Sunday Morning

The painting portrays the small businesses and shops of Seventh Avenue in New York City shortly after sunrise. It shows a cloudless sky over a long, red building. A red and blue striped barber pole sits in front of one of the doorways on the right side of the sidewalk, and a green fire hydrant is on the left. The bleak, empty street and storefronts are said to be a representation of the dire state of the city during the Great Depression.[1]

Despite the title, Hopper has said that the painting was not necessarily based on a Sunday view. The painting was originally titled Seventh Avenue Shops. The addition of "Sunday" to the title was "tacked on by someone else".[2]

The image was based on a building nearby Hopper's studio. It is said to be "almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue"; however, a few minor details were changed, like decreasing the size of the doorways and making the lettering on the storefronts less clear. [3]

It is currently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.[4][5][6][7]

The piece was originally sold to the Whitney for $2,000.[8] It was purchased with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney just a few months after it was painted, and would go on to become a part of the Whitney's founding collection. [9]

Scholar Karal Ann Marling notes that Edward Hopper's work "is a prelude to the wakeful coffee urns and to those who tend them to defeat the night".[10] According to the American art critic Blake Gopnik, "The painting’s bone-deep conservatism, and its obvious, almost polemical resistance to the most ambitious European art of its day. In the midst of the depression in America, that conservatism is as much a part of the painting’s subject as the closed shops it depicts."[1] The painting has become the inspiration for other works of art. Examples include Byron Vazakas' poem Early Sunday Morning[11] and John Stone's poem of the same name.[12]

• Whitney.org