Early Sunday Morning by Edward Hopper

Early Sunday Morning, which Hopper painted in 1930, has haunted me as no other New York painting ever has. Hopper brought to the silent street -- the barber pole, the fire hydrant, the uneven line of window shades, the awnings over the shop fronts -- the intensity of his own perception. Every time I come back to it, Early Sunday Morning seems larger than I remembered it. Since nothing is so typical of New York as the certain disappearance of something we once loved, the doggedness of Hopper's attachment had to be painted large. Why does that row of low brick houses on lower Seventh Avenue rivet me? It is because the street has entered into Hopper's consciousness in a way that transcends realism. He has made the drab and the commonplace beautiful through the force of belonging. Every detail in the street belongs to us and we to it.

-- Alfred Kazin "The Art City Our Fathers Built," The American Scholar 67:2