Edward Hopper - Hotel Room / 1931

Hotel Room / 1931 by Edward Hopper.
@2024 Heirs of Josephine Hopper / Licensed by Artist Rights society (ARS) NY / Vegan.

In an anonymous hotel room, a young woman is resting on the edge of a bed. It is nighttime, and she is tired. She has taken off her hat, dress, and shoes, and, with barely enough strength to unpack her bags, she checks the schedule for the train she will have to take the next day. The loneliness of modern cities is one of the central themes of Hopper’s work. In *Hotel Room*, the wall in the foreground and the dresser on the right constrain the space, while the bed’s long diagonal line directs our gaze toward the background, where an open window turns us into voyeurs of what is happening inside. The pensive female figure contrasts with the coldness of the room, which is dominated by clean lines and bright, flat colors, enlivened by the strong overhead light,

In *Hotel Room*, Hopper creates an evocative metaphor for loneliness, one of his favorite themes. It is the first in a long series of oil paintings set in various hotels that the artist created, undoubtedly driven by his fascination with travel. It was painted a year after *Sunday Morning*, another tribute to the alienation of contemporary man, which is recognized as his first masterpiece and was the first Hopper painting acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Following his early successes, Hopper ventured to use a large-format canvas in *Hotel Room*. It depicts a semi-nude young woman inside a simple room in a modest hotel, in the midst of a hot night. Josephine Nivison, Jo, the artist’s wife since 1924, noted in her diary that she posed for this painting in the Washington Square studio, and in the painter’s sketchbook she described the painting alongside a sketch made by the artist. Perhaps the young woman has just arrived, and without unpacking her luggage, she has taken off her hat, her dress, and her shoes and has sat languidly on the edge of the bed, lost in her own thoughts, with the introspection characteristic of the female figures in Hopper’s paintings. She is reading a yellowed piece of paper, which, as we know from Jo’s exhaustive notes, is a train schedule.

The calm, melancholic expression of the girl—depicted on a monumental scale—contrasts with the coldness of the room, which is bare, simple, and impersonal. The room is constructed using a few vertical and horizontal lines, which define large areas of solid color, intersected by the bold diagonal of the bed. It is illuminated by artificial light that we cannot see but which creates a strong contrast of light and shadow, which Hopper accentuates to lend the scene greater drama.

The composition of the figure—whose feet are cut off—and the ascending perspective with its pronounced diagonals are reminiscent of certain compositions by Degas. Through the use of a strong diagonal, Hopper immediately draws our gaze away from the girl and into the background, where a half-open window—which serves as the vanishing point of the composition—reveals the darkness of the night. Furthermore, Gail Levin, the author of the artist’s catalog raisonné, points out that the painting is directly derived from an illustration by Jean-Louis Forain in the magazine *Les Maîtres Humoristes*, which Hopper had brought back from Paris. In Forain’s drawing, a young woman in her underwear, sitting on the edge of a bed—which is also arranged diagonally—looks down at her lover’s shoes.

As is usually the case when we contemplate the works of this American painter, our imagination leaps to weave a story, to try to guess what came before and after this moment immortalized in his painting. This narrative weight makes the scene seem like it could very well be the pictorial rendering of a story told by his literary contemporaries (such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, or Robert Frost), who wrote about people’s private lives in plain, simple language, devoid of details and incidents. Likewise, the loneliness of empty interiors with open windows—used to evoke feelings of frustration—was a frequent motif in Romantic literature, which Hopper was so fond of. There are also precedents in the depictions of interiors in 17th-century Dutch painting, particularly those by Vermeer of Delft, another artist we inevitably recall when viewing Hopper’s paintings. The open window also creates a sense of inversion, through which Hopper draws the viewer into his work, transforming them into a voyeur.

Measurements: 68 x 76 cm.

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