Use for educational and research purposes is understood as the non-commercial use of images in presentations, conferences, school or university work, in classes at regulated education institutions, as well as in academic publications, with a circulation of less than 1,000 copies, provided that it is non-profit. Therefore, regardless of the terms of use of the images set out by the Fundación, it will be necessary to obtain a license from the author or copyright holder known to the Fundacion in order to reproduce or exploit the work. However, this work is protected by copyright. The Fundación authorizes the downloading of high-resolution images from its website for private use, use for educational and research purposes and non-commercial uses. The exploitation rights of the images correspond to the Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, F.S.P. The open window furthermore causes an effect of inversion, whereby Hopper brings the viewer into his work, transforming him into a voyeur. There are also precedents in the depictions of indoor settings in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, particularly the work of Vermeer of Delft, another artist who inevitably springs to mind when we view Hopper’s paintings. Similarly, the solitude of empty interiors with open windows, alluding to feelings of frustration, was common in romantic literature, of which Hopper was particularly fond. cummings or Robert Frost), who told of people’s private lives using a plain and simple language without details and incidents. On account of these narrative connotations, the work could easily be a pictorial transcription of a story narrated by Hopper’s literary contemporaries (such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, e. In Forain’s drawing a woman in her underclothes, seated on the edge of a bed - also positioned diagonally - stares at her lover’s shoes.Īs generally occurs when contemplating the works of this American painter, the painting incites the viewer to imagine the underlying story, to guess what comes before and after the instant immortalised in his painting. Gail Levin, the author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre, points out that this image is borrowed directly from an illustration by Jean-Louis Forain in the magazine Les Maîtres Humoristes, which Hopper had brought back from Paris. By using a powerful diagonal, Hopper immediately directs our gaze from the girl to the background, where a half-open window, which provides the vanishing point of the composition, reveals the pitch blackness of the night. The angle from which the figure is portrayed, causing her feet to fall outside the picture plane, and the upward perspective, recall certain compositions by Degas. It is illuminated by an artificial source that is not seen but creates a powerful contrast of light and shadow, which Hopper accentuates in order to heighten the dramatic force of the scene. The space is constructed from a few vertical and horizontal lines, which delimit large planes of unitary colour that are interrupted by the marked diagonal of the bed. The tranquil, melancholic appearance of the figure, which is rendered on a monumental scale, contrasts with the coldness of the stark, simple, depersonalised room. She reads a yellowed paper, which we know from Jo’s exhaustive notes to be a train timetable. Perhaps she has just arrived and, before unpacking, has taken off her hat, dress and shoes and sits languidly on the edge of the bed, engrossed in her own thoughts with the introspection characteristic of Hopper’s female figures. ![]() ![]() Josephine Nivison, Jo, the artist’s wife from 1924, wrote in her diary that she posed for this painting in the Washington Square studio and also gave a description of the composition in the artist’s notebook alongside a sketch made by him. The painting shows a semi-naked young woman inside a simple room in a modest hotel on a balmy night. It was executed a year after Sunday Morning, another tribute to the alienation of modern man, which is hailed as Hopper’s first masterpiece and was the first of his paintings to be acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art.įollowing his first taste of success, Hopper tried his hand at using a large canvas in Hotel Room. It is the first in a long series of oil paintings set in different hotels, undoubtedly inspired by the artist’s fascination with travelling. Hotel Room is an evocative metaphor of solitude, one of Hopper’s favourite subjects.
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