Quartos à Beira-Mar (Rooms by the Sea) - Edward Hopper

Quartos à Beira-Mar (Rooms by the Sea) - Edward Hopper
Yale University Art Gallery New Haven Estados Unidos
OST - 74x101 - 1951

As a mature artist, Edward Hopper spent most of his summers on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There, he designed and built a sunny, secluded studio at Truro, on a bluff overlooking the water. The view in Rooms by the Sea resembles what Hopper would have seen out the back door of his studio. But the description that he gave this painting in his notebook—”The Jumping Off Place”—suggests that the image is more a metaphor of solitude and introspection than a depiction of the actual place. Like Hopper’s most arresting images, this scene seems to be realistic, abstract, and surrealistic all at once.
The American artist Edward Hopper, born 1882, sold his first painting in 1913 for $250 but not one painting sold in his first solo exhibition in 1920 when he was 37. He had earned his living as a commercial illustrator but by 1924 a solo show sold out and in 1931 the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought a work for $4,500. He was on his way and he lived to enjoy being lauded. Last year a Hopper was sold at Christie's, New York, for $9.6m.

Hopper is best known for his dark, bleak paintings of one-night cheap hotels, or diners, waiting rooms, usually inhabited by loners, the alienated – his Nighthawks [1942] is one of the 20 Century's best known images – but Hopper's work is also drenched in sunshine: he's painted offices, cafeterias, bedrooms, lighthouses in Maine, where the sun streams in.

Here in this 1951 painting, Rooms by the Sea, Hopper fills his canvas with summer. Even the emptiness is beautiful.

Believing that 'If you could say it in words, there'd be no reason to paint', Hopper here paints shimmering air and a glorious light – things that are difficult if not impossible to capture in language.

There are two rooms: one, carpeted in soft green, is conventional and elegant with sofa, painting, chest of drawers but that only gets a look in. Cover the narrow strip on the left-hand side and the painting is transformed into something almost abstract.

The dove-grey wall and the golden floor are dramatically highlighted in angled brightness, turning surfaces into whiter shades of pale and lemon.

It's a room that opens outwards through a crisp, clearly outlined doorframe. That open, inviting door leads improbably, miraculously, to the beautiful blue calm sea. You just feel you want to step outside, you simply feel that you could walk on water.