August in the City

A pale building turns towards the spectator, its rounded wall carrying three tall windows. Behind the glass, warm curtains frame a small golden figure. The pavement curves away to the left, where green trees rise beneath a blue sky. Edward Hopper's August in the City makes an outward-looking window the centre of an otherwise unoccupied urban scene.

Painted in 1945, the oil on canvas belongs to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, bequest of R. H. Norton, accession 53.84. The Whitney's 2022 exhibition checklist records 58.4 × 76.2 cm. ^[1] The apparent inhabitant at the window is a sculpture, giving the painting a distinctive relationship between architecture, an image of a person and the absence of a living occupant.

A wall that turns

The curved facade gives the building a substantial presence. Its surface moves from a lighter area at the left towards deeper shade nearer the doorway on the right. The change allows a pale wall to describe volume without an emphatic outline around every portion.

The bay windows rise above a relatively broad lower wall. Their tall, narrow proportions differ from the building's curving base, creating a meeting between repeated uprights and a more continuous rounded form.

Their projections are important. Sills and upper surrounds interrupt the curve, making the windows more than openings cut into a smooth surface. Each has its own small architecture, with edges that catch light or cast shadow.

The building continues above and beyond the canvas. We cannot survey its full roof or plan, and much of the adjoining structure is absent. Hopper selects the part that brings window, curve and pavement into the closest relationship.

The street opens at the left

The foreground is crossed by a broad pale approach. Its curved line carries the eye past the base of the building, then towards the open left-hand side. This movement differs from the windows' strong vertical emphasis.

The empty ground also gives the wall room to project. We can understand the building's rounded shape partly because the pavement continues around it, establishing a space in which the architecture stands.

Further away, a darker horizontal boundary separates the near street from the greenery. The trees form a relatively dense mass, but their upper outlines remain irregular. Their changing greens contrast with the more restrained colour of the wall.

The sky occupies a small but clear area above this opening. Its blue gives the foliage a brighter limit and prevents the left-hand setting from becoming uniformly dark. An extensive outdoors is suggested within a comparatively narrow portion of the picture.

This imbalance helps concentrate attention. The architecture receives most of the field, while the open side provides enough distance to change its setting. A close building and a farther landscape coexist without a large panoramic view.

Curtains behind the glass

The window interiors contain warmer colours than the exterior wall. Brown and gold curtains descend behind the tall frames, with folds and narrow openings introducing a different rhythm from the pale masonry.

Their arrangement suggests a furnished domestic space, but it does not disclose a complete room. Glass, curtains and the angle of the openings limit what can be seen. We encounter selected objects near the window rather than a full interior extending towards a rear wall.

The frames repeatedly interrupt that view. A pale upright can divide one warm passage from another, making the spectator aware of architecture standing between outside and inside. Even where the colour is bright, access remains partial.

The surfaces also produce different kinds of light. The exterior wall has a relatively broad, continuous illumination; the interior contains smaller, more concentrated accents. Hopper gives the window visual attraction without making it a transparent explanation of everything behind it.

The small figure is a sculpture

The golden form near the centre initially offers something like a human presence. It occupies the window at a scale and position that can encourage us to imagine someone looking out. Its status as an object changes that first impression.

The 2011 exhibition labels for New York, New York: The 20th Century identify a sculpture in the window and locate the depicted apartment across from Riverside Park. ^[2] The work's human implication therefore comes partly from an artwork placed within the painted architecture.

This creates a different kind of stillness from that of a person pausing. A living figure might turn, move away or respond to a sight outside. The sculpture's apparent attention is supplied by its pose, placement and the spectator's reading of it.

Its warm colour also matters. Against curtains and darker surrounding passages, the figure becomes a small concentration of light. It is both a recognizable object and an accent within the larger window arrangement.

An ornamental entrance at the edge

At the right, a narrower doorway carries a decorative upper feature. Its projecting curves and pointed accents differ from the simpler tall lines of the bay windows. The building contains more than one architectural vocabulary within the selected view.

The entrance's darker opening gives this edge a greater depth. The pale wall turns towards it, and the trim provides a more intricate boundary around the recess. A relatively small area changes how we understand the adjoining facade.

The ornamental detail is also a counterweight. The sculpture attracts attention inside the windows; the entrance supplies a second cluster of particular forms outside. The two are separated by a broader expanse of wall and shadow.

Neither feature occupies the centre of a complete architectural portrait. Both appear within a crop that makes the spectator work from parts. The building's character emerges through these selected details rather than an exhaustive description of its design.

Two drawings of the setting

The Whitney holds a 1945 study for the painting, accession 70.159, in fabricated chalk on an irregularly shaped square sheet. ^[3] Within a drawn border, quick lines establish the projecting windows, the diagonal foreground and the ornamental entrance at the right.

The sketch gives the architecture a clear framework while leaving much of its surface unresolved. Repeated uprights suggest alternative or reinforced positions for the window divisions, and a few irregular marks locate the trees. The relation between close wall and open side is already a central concern.

Another 1945 sheet, accession 70.158a-b, has a more heavily shaded architectural study on its front. ^[3] Dark passages gather around the lower right of the facade and within the vegetation, giving the light parts a stronger tonal setting.

The two drawings show different degrees of elaboration. One relies largely on a sparse linear structure; the other makes more of the contrast between shaded and open areas. They reveal attention to the setting that surrounds the small object in the finished window.

The reverse of the second sheet carries a typewritten letter rather than another architectural image. ^[3] That material detail places the preparatory work among ordinary papers as well as within a museum's later drawing collection. It also distinguishes the two sides of one sheet from two separate studies of the building.

A season and a historical year

The title names August, inviting attention to the relationship between a city and its quieter summer intervals. The 2011 exhibition interpretation suggested the relative emptiness created by summer departures and also raised the 1945 context of wartime women waiting for returning men. ^[2]

Those are possible associations offered by a later museum account. The picture itself establishes a warm-season setting through title and foliage, while its date places it in the final year of the Second World War. Neither fact turns the sculpture into a documented portrait of someone awaiting a particular soldier.

The more immediate uncertainty belongs to the window. An apparently outward-looking figure occupies a domestic opening, yet that figure is an object. The spectator can recognize the familiar situation of a person at a window while also recognizing its transformation.

The empty pavement reinforces the ambiguity. There is no arrival for the sculpture to acknowledge and no living occupant shown nearby. The architecture, artwork and surrounding light sustain the encounter on their own.

Other views from outside

In Night Windows, the spectator glimpses a living woman through a dark exterior, with a moving curtain crossing the boundary. August in the City exchanges that nocturnal glimpse for a pale daytime facade and a human-shaped object within it.

New York Office again makes a window important to the relation between a person and the surrounding city. Its figure belongs to a working interior, whereas the Norton painting keeps the room itself less fully available.

City Roofs gives architecture another kind of close crop, concentrating on upper structures rather than a bay that might reveal an occupant. Both pictures make a selected portion of a building carry more attention than a complete skyline.

Follow the curved pavement towards the left, then return to the sculpture behind the tall glass. The opening towards trees gives the building a wider world, while the window brings attention back to a small, apparently watchful form. Hopper has made the absence of living people visible through the presence of something shaped like one.