Room in Brooklyn

Room in Brooklyn is a 1932 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper. It depicts a woman in a rocking chair inside an apartment, looking out a bay window at a tenement building, with sunlight entering the room. The work was improvised and completed at Hopper's Greenwich Village studio around the same time as its possible companion piece, Room in New York.

The painting evokes the style of Caspar David Friedrich through its use of the Rückenfigur motif and also shows the influence of fellow realist John Sloan, whose interior city scenes Hopper admired. Continuing his long-running exploration of figures in sunlit rooms, Room in Brooklyn is his only major painting to include flowers, since Hopper generally disliked painting them.

The work was first exhibited that year at the Modern American Paintings show at the Carnegie Institute, alongside his previous painting, Chop Suey (1929). It is now held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Inside a building, a room with three brown bay windows looks out from what appears to be a top-floor apartment. The view overlooks a cityscape filled with brick-red tenements and chimneys; a blue sky appears above, fringed by three green window curtains indoors. A green carpet covers the floor in a room that is mostly unadorned. A round table with a blue covering holds a vase full of pink and white flowers near a window on the right.

Sunlight streams in and falls on the table, the vase, and the carpet, continuing across the left side of the room. Here, a woman wearing a blue garment, possibly a dressing gown, sits in a yellow-brown rocking chair facing a window; she is only seen from behind. She appears to be leaning forward as if reading, but her hands are not visible. A table covered with red cloth sits behind her. The painting is signed "Edward Hopper" in the lower right corner.

Early on, Hopper had been part of a group of New York illustrators who had opposed the rigidity and conservatism of the National Academy of Design, a stance that dates back to his early study under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. According to his colleague Guy Pène du Bois, Henri's classes were "the seat of the sedition among the young".^[1] Hopper moved into 3 Washington Square North in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City, in 1913. Josephine Nivison (Jo) joined him after they were married in 1924, moving into a larger, top-floor apartment in the same building with a view facing Washington Square Park and remained at that address for the rest of their lives.^[2]

The early 1930s were a productive and successful time for Hopper, full of sales and recognition for his art.^[1] Du Bois sang Hopper's praises in the literature, commending both Hopper and his colleague Charles E. Burchfield for their contributions to a new form of modern American art.^[3] In 1931 alone, Hopper sold 30 paintings.^[1] The Academy announced in March 1932 that they had elected Hopper to their ranks, but Hopper declined their membership.^[4]

Hopper had long been unhappy by the way he was treated. The Academy, a conservative gatekeeper of new American art,^[a] had spent many years ignoring his submissions.^[1] This period of his life, lasting approximately 15 years, was described as one of "disappointment and discouragement".^[6] By the early 1920s, Hopper had only sold two paintings,^[6] but there was still demand for his etchings, with Hopper producing 50 from 1915 to 1923.^[7] In that same year, he painted watercolors with Jo in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with the two becoming romantically involved that summer.^[1]

Jo was instrumental in helping Hopper jump-start his career, though in later years he was reticent to admit it. She exhibited her watercolors in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum, persuading the organizers to let Hopper participate. They accepted, with the critics mostly ignoring her submissions and praising Hopper instead.^[1] The following year, after his first showing at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, Hopper was able to quit commercial art and devote himself to fine art full-time. Museums began acquiring his work, with the Museum of Modern Art hosting his first solo exhibition in 1933.^[6]

Hopper began working on Room in Brooklyn at the beginning of 1932. It was improvised and spontaneous, although the story behind the work is disputed.^[8] Jo said he had planned to paint the Brooklyn Bridge outside the window, but when it came time, he discovered it would not work. Hopper was worried about "clutter", recalls Jo, forcing him to eliminate the bridge idea.^[1]

Jo said that it was entirely unclear if any remnants of Brooklyn remained in the final painting once Hopper decided not to paint the bridge.^[1] Curator Carol Troyen is skeptical of this explanation, since there was little room in the painting to accommodate a bridge.^[8] Hopper completed the painting in February along with its possible pendant, Room in New York.^[8]

Hopper told art critic Brian O'Doherty that Room in Brooklyn was the only painting of flowers in his entire catalog. "I don't care very much for flowers", he recalled. "In all the work I've done there's only one painting with flowers, Room in Brooklyn, a little vase on the table with flowers...the so-called beauty is all there. You can't add anything to them of your own—yourself."^[9] Levin believes that these comments referred to Jo's preference for flowers in Hopper's home, which she used for painting still lifes.^[1]

The painting is suggestive of the style of several different artists. Many art historians have noted the influence of the style of Caspar David Friedrich on Hopper's work. Friedrich, a 19th century German Romantic painter, was known for his use of the Rückenfigur, a motif showing a solitary figure seen only from behind who gazes out at a landscape. David Anfam believed that Hopper was aware of Friedrich.^[10]

Hopper had studied German, made use of German motifs in his early work, and displayed knowledge of the German art tradition.^[1] He visited Berlin in July 1907, spending less than a week in the city. This was at a time when the German public had just rediscovered Friedrich, whose work was shown in the Exhibition of German Art of the Century, just one year earlier. Scholar Margaret Iversen compares Room in Brooklyn with Friedrich's Woman at a Window (1822).^[10]

Artist John Sloan was influential in Hopper's early life from around the time of World War I until the early 1920s.^[11] Hopper wrote positively about Sloan in 1927,^[5] anticipating his own embrace of many of Sloan's themes. According art historian Robert Hobbs, Sloan was known for portraying everyday people engaged in solitary activities within buildings, eating establishments and theaters, of seascapes and scenes from modern city life.^[11] While Hopper draws from much of Sloan's work, and they were both realists associated with the Ashcan School, a term they mutually disliked and both disavowed, they were also very different people.^[11]

Echoes of Sloan's etchings and paintings can be found in several of Hopper's works during this period. His etching of Evening Wind (1921) evokes Sloan's Turning Out the Light (1905), while Room in Brooklyn is reminiscent of Sloan's The Women's Page (1905), particularly as a source for the figure of the woman in the chair.^[11] Hobbs argues that the woman in the chair is similar to the popular image of women sewing from 18th and 19th century art, except Hopper has turned the image away from the viewer. For Hobbs, Hopper "makes her anonymous as the mass of undifferentiated Brooklyn tenements outside the window".^[11]

In works such as A Window on the Street (1912), Sloan called back to the Pre-Raphaelites and even earlier, the Renaissance tradition, with his focus on women in interiors. Hopper strips this tradition bare in his work, rejecting it in favor of a stark, modern realism of the city environs and its unidentified people living in nondescript tenement buildings.^[11] These differences extended to their personal lives. Sloan was active in fighting for left-wing causes and supported the right of workers to unionize in illustrations for socialist newspapers.^[11]

Hopper on the other hand had no real interest in taking a political position, and made a living at this time in his life working as an illustrator for corporate magazines owned by advertising, banking, and hospitality companies. Some of Hopper's commercial illustrations promoted big business, but he also undermined the same ideas in his fine art.^[11] Hopper also minimized the importance of his commercial work, believing it diminished the importance of his fine art. After his death, art historians praised the high quality of Hopper's commercial art, recognizing it as a testing ground for the visual narratives and designs that would appear in his later, more successful paintings.^[12]

Art historian Louis Shadwick believes the painting moves beyond the usual Hopperian clichés of loneliness and alienation, suggesting that a more multilayered perspective and interpretation is possible. Shadwick believes that the richly colored palette and the figure framed in sunlight suggest something more subtle and nuanced.^[13] Troyen notes that the painting is part of Hopper's long-running, figure in a sunlit room theme that stretches back decades in the past to Summer Interior (1909), culminating decades later with Sun in an Empty Room (1963), with the figure eventually removed entirely.^[8]

The terraced house architecture appears similar to other Hopper paintings, such as The City (1927), From Williamsburg Bridge (1928), and Early Sunday Morning (1930), the latter of which loosely depicts buildings once found on Seventh Avenue.^[8] Many of the buildings Hopper depicts in his New York paintings no longer exist, having since been demolished and replaced over time by newer structures. In response to this redevelopment, Hopper and his wife lobbied to preserve the older architecture in their Greenwich Village neighborhood over the course of their lives.^[2]

Hopper delivered the painting to his art dealer, Frank K.M. Rehn, in February 1932.^[8] It was exhibited at least five times^[14] before the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bought the painting in early 1935 for $1,800^[15] ($42,269 in 2025), under the direction of its third curator, George H. Edgell, who had an interest in modern art.^[16] The purchase was supported by the Charles Henry Hayden Fund.^[1]

The painting was exhibited shorty after it was completed, first appearing alongside Hopper's previous work, Chop Suey (1929), at the Modern American Paintings exhibition at the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, from April 28 to May 30, 1932.^[17]

• Edward Hopper's New York (The Whitney, 2023)^[13]
• Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition (The Whitney, 1964)^[7]
• 26th Venice Biennale (1952)^[14]
• Hopper (The Whitney, 1950)^[14]
• 54th American Annual (Chicago Art Institute, 1943)^[14]
• Hopper, (Carnegie Institute, 1937)^[14]
• Twenty-First Annual (Toledo Museum, 1934)^[14]
• 41st American Annual (Cincinnati Art Museum, 1934)^[14]
• Hopper (Arts Club of Chicago, 1934)^[14]
• Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition (MoMA, 1933)^[6]
• Modern American Paintings (Carnegie Institute, 1932)^[14]

• List of works by Edward Hopper

• Room in Brooklyn at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.