![]() ![]() Josephine (Nivinson) Hopper, the artist’s wife and an artist in her own right, described this painting, which reprises one of his signature subjects-a solitary figure, physically and emotionally detached from his surroundings and other people-as ‘the man in concrete wall.’” -Met Museum label. Begun in Cape Cod over the summer and finished in New York City, it was the only oil painting Hopper produced that year. MATT / HAND CARVED PICTURE FRAMES / 157 EAST 54TH STREET / NEW YORK CITY / PLAZA 8-23_ “The Metropolitan acquired this painting shortly after it was completed in late October 1953. This frame bears Hirshhorn accession number 66.2507, for Edward Hopper, Hotel By A Railroad, 1952, provenance Frank Rehn Gallery, Joseph H. Handwritten verso: REHN and various numbers. frame design original to a number of Hopper paintings. ![]() Period American Modernist “Hopper” frame polychrome washed patina over metal-leaf gilding on combed gesso substrate molding width 3-7/8 in. Framed by Gill & Lagodich for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2021). Office in a Small City, 1953, oil on canvas, 28 x 40 in. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” - Art Institute of Chicago, Essential Guide, 2013, p. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. "Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image-with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative-has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, 33-1/8 x 60 inches, custom-designed, gilded, and patinated frame, 9-karat gray-gold leaf over fine-combed gesso and cast ornament on carved wood custom-fabricated in the Gill & Lagodich New York studios combed pattern, ogee profile, and gilded patina based on original Hopper frame models. ![]()
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