Early Sunday Morning Analysis
Early Sunday Morning Early Sunday Morning is a quintessential Edward Hopper painting.
Looking at the painting you see a stretch of street with no street signs and completely void of any human activity, nothing is happening. The point of view of the painting is from across the street, looking at the two story properties. The shadows, pavement, and the building create an interesting series of horizontal lines. The only objects to break the horizontal line of the buildings are a barber’s shop pole and a fire hydrant.
Instead of reating a composition that directs the viewer’s eye around the scene, the painting has only horizontal and sparse vertical lines which let your eye simply scan around it. Hopper lets the early morning orange color of the light completely cover the frame while the long shadows show the time of day.
In stark contrast to the warm colors of the light and the red plastered second story, the first story of the building is a light green which demands your attention. The shops are all dark inside and the gold colored titles of the businesses are all unreadable.
Above the small shops are rows of apartments which are also dark inside. Each window into the homes has their own differences, showing individual personalities of the people who live there. The way Hopper left the street scene unrecognizable to a certain street, gives the illusion that this could be any small row of businesses in America. The absence of any people give the painting a calm feeling, like a birds chip and a slight wind might be the only thing to break the silence.
Nobody is awake and the businesses have yet to open.
A scene hat many people might take for granted. Just like in many of Hopper’s paintings, he perfectly captures the feeling of American life of the time. Hopper effectively shows the calm and slow emotion of the painting with only the architecture and the way he masterfully allows the light to take over the scene. In the same way Edward Hopper illustrates the peaceful mood of the street scene in Early Sunday Morning, the smooth Jazz styling of “Early Sunday Morning” by Isaac Hayes has the same tone and mood that one might imagine when looking at the painting.
It has soft melody of drum snares, trumpet, violin, and bass that together are calm and relaxing.
The song does not have any fast or slow sections; it is simply a calm and repetitive tune which matches the calm and repetitive composition of the painting. “Early Sunday Morning” is void of lyrics and relies solely on the collaboration of instruments to express the feeling; similarly, Hopper uses only the collaboration of light and architecture of the painting to show the emotion.
