Learning to Love Yourself — A Return to the Paintings of Edward Hopper

Many years ago, I came across Hopper’s works without knowing who Hopper was. I didn’t know Munch, or Modigliani either. To me, they were just pictures — greasy-looking prints on low-quality paper, flipped through one after another. There was no coffee on the table, no music in the background. Time didn’t freeze. My breath didn’t pause. And there was none of the awe — not even a flicker of emotion — that I would expect to feel when recalling it decades later.

Back then, I didn’t understand words like desolation, alienation, detachment, or indifference. I couldn’t distinguish fame from influence, or grasp the weight of words like legacy or classic. That was 30 years ago, before the age of “reading images” fully arrived. For children, though, reading images came naturally. I still remember the size and weight of that art magazine in my hands — a softcover edition of Meishu from the 1980s, its cover fraying from just a few page turns. The painting might have been Automat or Chop Suey — something about a café. I was, at most, eight years old.

Now, with the clarity of age, comes awareness — of coldness, pain, and the weight of human disconnection. Yet those childhood impressions remain vivid in their casual innocence. And honestly, none of Hopper’s works were ever meant to feel personal. His entire body of work is about distance — people severed from one another, emotionally unreachable. You can remove any figure from his paintings and the balance remains intact, just like in Hotel by the Railroad. It’s as if their absence only confirms the point: lives that would go on unchanged, with or without each other. Cold light floods the room, yet no source is visible.

Critics often say Hotel by the Railroad defines Hopper’s essence — people who have lost interest in life, in each other. Maybe we all exist in this “vacuum” where true connection is prohibited.

In Office at Night, 1940, an astonishing piece, every viewer can interpret past, present, or future. It captures a suspended moment, a breath between history’s pages — people are absent, yet endlessly imagined.

Then there’s Rooms by the Sea, often titled Cape Cod Morning. Here the tone shifts — still and bright, yet unmistakably Hopper. Poetry shaped his early works deeply: Whitman and Emerson lent an American soul to his images.

Hopper’s love for poetry extended to Verlaine, whose verses, like in La Lune Blanche (“White Moon”), shaped his visual atmosphere:

In Soir Bleu, or in his etching Les Deux Pigeons, you see literary references turned visual. The latter, inspired by La Fontaine’s fable, evokes lovers waiting, longing, separating, and reuniting — emotional rhythms echoing through Hopper’s subdued style.

Theatre, too, profoundly influenced him. A fan of dramatic literature, he was steeped in the visual language of stagecraft. In New York Movie, 1939, he splits the frame to dramatize detachment — the usher lost in thought, isolated, mirroring society’s unease under the shadow of war.

Later in life, in works like The Recall of the Singer, Hopper alluded to life’s final curtain call. He and his wife Jo both suffered hospitalizations in the same year — this painting, with two figures bowing, feels like an elegy for their shared journey.

Jo, more than muse, was his co-actor and director’s partner. In every performance he painted, she was there — model, wife, painter, co-creator. The lines between real and imagined blur seamlessly in their private theatre of life.

His most iconic piece, Nighthawks, 1942, captures not only Hopper’s signature loneliness but also wartime New York’s deserted eeriness. Four figures inhabit a diner — disconnected, expressionless. Outside, the streets are deserted. It’s a portrait of urban isolation, imagined or remembered from deep within his subconscious.

There’s Summer Evening, Room in New York, Summertime, Night Windows… the quiet of his canvases always speaks louder than noise.

I also love his landscapes. House at Dusk brings us to Manhattan’s edge, with a lone woman at the window, evening creeping in. Hopper drew inspiration here from Goethe’s Wanderer’s Nightsong:

Over the hilltops,
Silence.
Among all the treetops
You feel
Hardly a breath.
Birds fall silent in the woods.
Just wait — soon
You too shall rest.

Goethe called this poem “an extraordinary visual picture” — and Hopper painted it in his own silent way.

Other pieces — Early Sunday Morning, Railroad Sunset, My Egypt — speak of structures, systems, a yearning for permanence in the transient.

And then, his earliest work: Le Quai des Grands Augustins, from 1902, when Hopper was just 20. There’s warmth in some of those early works, even a hint of tenderness.

Even his boxing scene, Dempsey and Firpo, radiates silent power. His figures — in New York Interior, Summer Interior, Sunday, or Office in a Small City — are always alone, but never incidental.

Finally, his self-portrait: quiet, cool, thoughtful. The eyes, the mouth, the hat — it looks exactly as I imagined. But his heart? That, you’ll have to search for in the paintings.

About Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was one of the most important American realist painters of the 20th century. Born in Nyack, New York, he began drawing at age ten and later studied under Robert Henri, the father of American Realism. Hopper’s paintings offer haunting portrayals of modern life — alienation, solitude, and emotional distance. He focused on houses, hotels, and urban landscapes, exploring light and shadow to capture the emotional undertow beneath America’s exterior. His work resonates with a timeless silence that still echoes today.