People in the Sun

Deck chairs are lined up on a concrete terrace against a backdrop of vast blue skies and rolling mountains.
Facing the intense sunlight, five men and women sit in a row.

At first glance, they might appear to be tourists enjoying a leisurely holiday at a resort in the American West.
During the 1950s and 1960s, a culture of leisure blossomed as people drove their cars into the great outdoors to bask in the sun.
This painting is often described as depicting just such a vacation scene.

Yet in truth, this is not an actual scenic location in the West.
Nor do these figures feel even the slightest joy of a vacation.

In the autumn of 1960.
In his studio on Washington Square in New York, the seventy-eight-year-old Edward Hopper completed this painting.
At the time, the American art world was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, championed by figures like Jackson Pollock.
It was an era when figurative painting was dismissed as outdated.
Struggling with a creative slump and the physical decline of old age, Hopper was able to produce only about two large oil paintings a year.
Even so, he continued to believe in the power of figurative art to portray the human interior, even signing a formal protest against museums that favored abstract art almost exclusively.
This work was an entirely self-directed endeavor, where he cast onto canvas a theme he had long nurtured within himself.

Hopper and his wife, Jo, had crossed the American continent by car for years, visiting places throughout the West, including the Grand Canyon.
Yet Hopper himself felt a deep sense of disorientation and unease in the face of the West's blinding light and immense scale—
so much so that he lost the creative drive he had felt on the East Coast.

The setting of this painting is an imaginary landscape synthesized from his memories.
The inspiration for the figures came from city dwellers soaking up the sun on benches in Washington Square Park, just steps from his studio.
Hopper merged this urban crowd with the rugged mountain ranges of the West that had overwhelmed him.
In preparing the composition, he produced numerous preparatory sketches.
In his early drawings, the figures were positioned closer together, resembling a natural scene at a tourist destination.
Yet as he moved to the oil canvas, he deliberately widened the spaces between them and gave the angles of the chairs a strict geometric precision—
all to heighten the impossibility of dialogue and a sense of eerie stillness.