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Early Sunday Morning is a 1930 painting by Edward Hopper.

Description
"Early Sunday Morning" is one of Edward Hopper's most iconic paintings. In "Early Sunday Morning" we see his appreciation of a row of attached buildings at W. 15th Street and 7th Avenue in 1930's New York City (Manhattan) with shops on the street level and apartments above. It portrays the small businesses and shops of Seventh Avenue in New York City shortly after sunrise.

Meaning
The Early Sunday Morning painting appears less a specific picture of New York and more an image of America. Both the barber pole on the sidewalk and the white curtains in the second-floor apartment connote the life-styles of small-time business people throughout the United States. Although one cannot tell from the signs on the storefronts what kinds of business are represented except for the barber shop, the sizes of the buildings suggest that they provided inexpensive goods and services. During the Depression basic industries such as steel suffered, but small, service-oriented businesses selling shoes, clothes, food, drugs, and gas stayed in business, and some even prospered: gas stations, laundries, beauty parlors, and barber shops served a growing clientele.

The shops in Early Sunday Morning, which extend in a continuous line beyond the confines of the picture and reinforce the horizontal format of the canvas, emphasize the ubiquity of small-time businesses in the United States. On the upper-right corner of the picture, the dark brown passage of paint suggests the side of a large building and indicates the possible encroachment of the corporate world on this sunny block. Other shadows that are also cast from the right subtly imply that the small-time shopkeeper, the Progressives' symbol of the individual and the early nineteenth-century American ideal, is in conflict with larger, less clearly defined forces. In this manner the painting continues the Progressive ideal and obliquely refers to the shadowy realm of larger structures on the right.

Provenance
It is currently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The museum is located in New York and is open to the public with a purchase of a ticket. https://visit.whitney.org/tickets/ItemList.aspx?node_id=86