Early Sunday Morning - Edward Hopper

The barber's pole on the pavement and the white curtains of the second-floor flat evoke the lifestyle of small businessmen across the United States. Hoper originally painted a person in the second-floor window, but later decided that the architecture reflected his feelings and so removed this individual. Although one cannot tell from the signs on the shop fronts what types of businesses are represented, with the exception of the barber shop, the size of the buildings suggests that they provided cheap goods and services.

In the upper right-hand corner of the painting, the dark brown paintwork suggests the side of a large building and indicates the possible encroachment of the business world on this sunny block. Other shadows, also cast from the right, subtly suggest that the small businessman, a symbol of the individual and the early nineteenth-century American ideal for progressives, is in conflict with larger, less clearly defined forces. In this way, the painting perpetuates the progressive ideal and obliquely refers to the shadowy realm of the larger structures of the right.