Excerpt: The Waning Years of Edward Hopper

But whatever it is, he makes it appear a semi-rural place, set along a dirt road and beside a patch of woods with shadowed undergrowth. Morning sunlight brushes against the upper foliage and spreads across the wooden storefront, where it picks out three slender classical columns that frame the plate glass, a trace memory of the ancient world passed down to a small-town façade. Through the window the same light bends along one white interior wall, showing us a stand of empty shelves and the top filigree of an ornate steel cash register.

What is this painting about? Sunlight and silence, of course. Those are two of Hopper’s constants. But a further answer is just to the right of the picture’s dead center, where a brown wall clock appears almost to float against the stark white wall where it hangs. Its presence is magnified by the long shadow it casts under the raking morning light. Hopper did nothing by accident, and this clock is nearly central for a reason. It’s the keynote of the picture, which, among the other things it’s about, is about nothing less than the power of time. Hopper had turned sixty-six in July and had been feeling his age for years. Because time was no longer on his side, it was that much more on his mind. 

In September 1948, Edward Hopper put the final touches on the painting he would call Seven A.M. As with most of his great pictures—and this is one of them—its quiet power is both plain and a bit mysterious. It shows us a very ordinary scene, a portion of a white storefront, with a partial view of its interior through its wide plate glass windows. It’s not clear what kind of business this is. A pharmacy? A barbershop? Even Hopper wasn’t sure.

And as it turns out, this picture is not just a meditation on time but a bit of time recaptured, a painted memory, because the storefront it shows us is based on an actual shop Hopper had first seen in his youth. It was, and still is, just up the road from his childhood home in Nyack, New York, a Hudson River town of about four thousand in the years he grew up there.

We know from the journals of his wife, Josephine, that his last addition to this canvas was to delicately brush in the clock’s slim hands. He set them to the hour that gives the painting its name, a hushed moment before the shop will open for business. Did Hopper produce this image of an eternal morning as a kind of wish fulfillment, a way to return to the seven A.M. of his own life, to a world at first light, and with it the new beginning promised by each new day? Very possibly, because a new beginning was something the aging Hopper might well have wished for.

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Excerpted from Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph by Richard Lacayo. Copyright © 2022.