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The prominent track evokes Hopper's recurring themes of transience and the loneliness of the traveler.

The broad horizontals in the foreground are like a stage and could have been inspired by Hopper's frequent attendance at Broadway plays.

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Edward Hopper

New York, New Haven and Hartford,            1931

oil on canvas

30 x 50 in.

Emma Harter Sweetser Fund

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Although Edward Hopper is best known for his views of New York interiors and buildings, he also painted landscapes, particularly in and around his summer home in South Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. These scenes capture the starkness of the rural landscape with its rustic barns and houses. Most of his Cape Cod views are devoid of people, giving them an abandoned look that echoes the loneliness and alienation reflected in his New York scenes.

New York New Haven and Hartford is named after the railroad line that operated in southern New England and New York. The painting was created during the Depression and depicts a landscape and desolate house in South Truro. The prominence of the tracks evokes Hopper’s recurring theme of the transience and loneliness of the traveler. The long horizontals of the railroad are like a stage that separates the audience from the performance. The swaying trees suggest that the breeze from a recently passing train has caught its branches. The railroad is an unwelcome encroachment that Hopper indicates by using the strong horizontal that seems to intrude upon the quiet rural landscape. Beginning with  the 19^th-century Hudson River School painters, American artists have depicted cultivation and technology as encroachments on the wilderness that would eventually destroy it.

References

Carl Little. Edward Hopper’s New England, San Francisco: Promegranate Art Books, 1993. ISBN-13: 978-1566403153

Priscilla Paton. Abandoned New England: Landscape in the Works of Homer, Frost Hopper, Wyeth and Bishop, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2003. ISBN-13: 978-1584653134