Soir Bleu
Edward Hopper, 1914
Image not available: work still under copyright
Soir Bleu (1914) is one of the few early works by Edward Hopper that depict Paris, a city he came to know during his trips to Europe. The scene unfolds on a café terrace at dusk, with round tables and paper lanterns. Hopper gathers around a central table a painter in a beret with an orange beard, a soldier seen from behind with fringed epaulettes, and a clown with white makeup and red lips, a figure evoking Pierrot, the melancholy character so prominent in nineteenth-century art. Beside them stands a heavily made-up woman in a low-cut dress, approaching the group, while a man in a cap and working-class clothing, isolated at another table, is generally taken to be her pimp. To the right, an elegant couple observes the scene. The debts to Courbet, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec are evident in the subject and the arrangement of the figures. Hopper later said the clown was a self-portrait and that the painter recalls van Gogh. Everyone sits silent and absorbed, and hardly any hands are visible, anticipating the isolation that would define his later work. The painting was poorly received at its only exhibition, in New York in 1915, and the artist kept it rolled up until after his death.
- Painter
- Edward Hopper
- Date
- 1914
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 92 × 183 cm
- Museum
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
- Genre
- genre art