Chop Suey

The largest lettering in Edward Hopper's Chop Suey belongs to a sign outside the restaurant. Its cropped red-and-white forms rise beside a window, drawing attention away from two women seated at the near table and towards the commercial world beyond them. The women are close enough to share a meal or conversation, yet the bright room gives us surprisingly little evidence of either activity. A teapot is present; a developed story is harder to find.

Hopper painted the oil on canvas in 1929. Measuring 32 by 38 inches, it became a major work in the Barney A. Ebsworth collection before its 2018 auction. ^[1] The painting is often approached through its mysterious figures, but the architecture and sign deserve equal attention. Much of its energy takes place around the people rather than in an unmistakable action between them.

A table shared by two women

The foreground pair occupy opposite sides of a white table. The woman facing us wears green, with a dark hat shading her forehead. Her companion presents her back, turning the head into a rounded blue form above a paler sweater. Their positions give us unequal access: one face can be inspected, while the other remains largely withheld.

That asymmetry matters more than the simple fact that there are two people. We can search the facing woman's expression, but cannot check it against a fully visible response. Even if we imagine a conversation, its exchange is incomplete from our position.

Their bodies also meet the light differently. The facing woman's pale face and neckline emerge strongly above the green clothing. Her companion's back offers a broader area of quieter colour, with the shoulders and arms defining how she sits at the table. The two figures participate in the same setting without becoming equivalent shapes.

The table brings them together, but the visible white area between them remains substantial. Their hands do not establish a conspicuous shared action. Hopper makes companionship physically possible while leaving the character of the relationship open.

The arrangement is not quite that of a private portrait made public. The facing woman's head sits among larger, more assertive areas of colour: green clothing below, blue and white beyond the neighbouring window, and warm architecture to the right. Her face is an important destination for the eye, but its power comes from being held within this surrounding pattern. Isolating it in a cropped detail would produce a different kind of encounter.

Her companion's back makes the near table more spatially persuasive. The shoulder and hat overlap the setting beyond them, establishing an intervening body between us and the window. That body is not merely a device for withholding a second expression. Its place in the foreground helps the viewer understand the distance that separates the near table from the far wall.

The two positions also describe different possible ways of being seen in a restaurant. A person may be clearly visible to a companion across the table and almost entirely unreadable to somebody seated behind. Hopper lets the spectator experience that inequality within one pair. The room's social space is made from several lines of sight, only some of which we can share.

It is this combination of compositional and social work that makes the second woman indispensable. Removing her would not simply make the picture more lonely. It would change the table's orientation, the foreground's depth, the rhythm of colour around the facing figure and the kind of partial knowledge available to an observer.

Other diners, another depth

A second table appears farther back at the left. A man is shown in profile, while another figure is partly cut by the surrounding architecture and the edge of the view. This smaller group prevents the foreground women from becoming the only occupants of the restaurant.

The rear diners occupy a different visual register. Their shapes are darker and more compressed, with less space for us to inspect their gestures. They help establish the room's depth and social use without developing into a separate episode.

This is an interior selected from a larger establishment. The painting does not show the kitchen, entrance or every table. Its concentration on two groups should not be mistaken for a complete census of the restaurant.

Nor do the groups form an obvious chain of communication. We can move our attention from one table to the other, but the people do not visibly organise themselves around a common event. The room holds several possible stories at once, none sufficiently developed to take command.

The sign outside

The vertical sign supplies an unusually forceful form of language within the picture. We can read the visible portion of the restaurant name, while the rest extends beyond the chosen view. Its scale implies a sign designed to attract people moving through the street below.

Franklin Kelly's National Gallery catalogue entry places the painting among familiar urban restaurant subjects and associates the elevated sign with an upstairs establishment. ^[2] The image gives us a place within that establishment rather than a pedestrian's full view of its façade.

The sign's red ground and pale letters are visually assertive. Small repeated shapes around the lettering add a mechanical rhythm, unlike the softer contours of the faces and hats. Advertising becomes one of the picture's most conspicuous presences even though no customer is shown responding to it.

Its cropping is equally important. A complete sign might serve primarily as an identifying label. Here the letters also become shapes lodged within the window's larger structure. We read them and look at their pattern at the same time.

A Chinese-American title in an American street

The words on the sign belong to the history of Chinese-American enterprise as well as to Hopper's design. Historian Charles W. Hayford traces chop suey's development through the adaptation of Chinese cooking to American customers and rejects a single picturesque invention story. His account gives Chinese-American restaurant owners and cooks an active role in creating a widely recognised urban food culture. ^[3] The title should not be treated as the name of an inexplicably foreign object dropped into an otherwise self-contained American scene.

Haiming Liu similarly examines the restaurant business as a negotiation between immigrant enterprise, local expectations and racial exclusion. He shows how chop suey establishments extended beyond Chinatown and became part of ordinary metropolitan eating. ^[4] This history concerns the conditions that made such a restaurant familiar; it does not identify the proprietors of Hopper's particular invented room.

The painting makes that cultural presence conspicuous through lettering rather than through a carefully described dish. We can read a commercial offer more easily than we can inspect what the customers are consuming. The sign addresses an audience outside the room, while the people inside occupy their own smaller intervals. Chinese-American restaurant culture appears simultaneously as a publicly advertised category and a setting for individual use.

That distinction widens the social questions the canvas can support. The visibility of the sign is not the same thing as the visibility of the labour that sustains the restaurant. Cooks and proprietors need not appear for the establishment to depend on them. Hopper's selected view gives the customers considerable pictorial attention and leaves the restaurant's production largely outside the frame. Recognising that selection enriches the image without claiming that its unseen workers have been documented by the painting.

The room concentrates on particular diners within that larger history of immigration. Its title can open that larger history, however, and makes clear that the apparently ordinary American interior was already a place of cultural encounter.

Daylight and angular colour

The window at the rear left contains striking areas of pale blue, darker blue and white. Their edges intersect at angles, creating a pattern quite different from the more stable verticals of the room's woodwork.

These exterior shapes are not merely incidental background. They compete with the diners for attention and make the brightest parts of the picture extend beyond human skin and table linen. The city contributes colour and geometry as well as a social setting.

The warmer window surrounds hold the cooler areas in place. Browns, oranges and golden tones make a substantial architectural frame around the people. The distinction between warm interior and cool exterior is strong without becoming perfectly uniform.

The light across the foreground woman is another part of this arrangement. Her face is conspicuous because of its relation to neighbouring dark and bright forms. Visibility does not necessarily produce psychological intimacy: a well-lit face can remain difficult to interpret.

Art historian Carol Troyen draws particular attention to the painting's contrast between an animated exterior pattern and a comparatively restrained interior. ^[5] That contrast is a useful reason to look away from the figures temporarily. The picture's apparent stillness depends on an active surrounding design.

When lettering becomes an architectural shape

The sign changes as attention moves between reading and looking. Read as language, its letters identify the kind of restaurant. Seen as a painted form, they are pale shapes against a red ground, interrupted by the boundary of the canvas and the window's framing. Hopper can use them as information without surrendering their visual weight to their meaning.

Their arrangement also belongs to two different viewing positions. A projecting sign is intended to be noticed from the street, where its height and boldness advertise a business. The spectator in the painting meets it obliquely and at close quarters from within the establishment. Something designed for a distant public view has become a large, cropped neighbour of the diners.

The effect is almost a reversal of scale. A face requires close attention despite its importance to us as a human observer; a letter can assert itself with relatively little looking. The painting repeatedly sends the eye from one kind of recognition to another. We search the woman for an expression and read the sign for a name, while the actual coloured surfaces remain part of a common design.

The bright exterior patterns work differently again. They offer architectural fragments that are easier to register as angled colour than as a continuous street. Language, human likeness and partly abstract pattern coexist in the same windowed corner. The setting's apparent simplicity is therefore deceptive: it offers several distinct kinds of visual information and allows none to explain all the others.

This is one reason the advertisement should not be dismissed as background detail. Its assertiveness helps determine how the women are seen. Their quieter gestures take place beside an object whose public purpose is to attract attention, and whose painted form continues to do so.

The lower window and the hanging coat

The lower section of the right-hand window contains a golden, patterned area. It interrupts a simple view through clear glass and introduces another surface on which marks and colours can accumulate. Its details are less readily understood than the bold lettering above.

This makes the window more complex than a transparent opening. It combines views outward, architectural divisions and areas that attract attention as painted surfaces. Our sense of the restaurant is built from these different kinds of visual information.

A coat hangs close to the foreground woman. Its warm colour and long vertical folds are distinct from the seated bodies. It adds a sign of occupation without introducing another person whose face or actions must be interpreted.

Such details make the room feel used. They also slow our progress through it: an apparent figure-like shape resolves into clothing, a window becomes partly a patterned plane, and an advertisement becomes a sequence of clipped letters. The ordinary setting rewards repeated inspection.

A restaurant without a visible meal

The red teapot provides a recognisable object on the near table. Its rounded body differs from the white tabletop's sharper outline, giving the foreground a small, concentrated accent.

Yet the painting is not primarily an account of food being consumed. Plates of a named dish do not explain the title, and the women's occupations cannot be recovered from a lunch order. What we see most clearly is the space in which dining could take place.

The distinction protects the image from a misleadingly literal reading. A restaurant name does not tell us exactly what these customers have ordered, whether a course has just been cleared or how long they have been sitting. Those are plausible questions, not facts supplied by the canvas.

Compared with Tables for Ladies, whose foreground display makes food and service conspicuous, Chop Suey concentrates on customers and the architecture around them. The white table becomes an interval between bodies rather than a crowded still life.

The pale table links objects of very different sizes. The teapot is a small, compact form; the two seated figures make much larger interruptions around the surface; an area of brightness beyond the window belongs to another distance altogether. Light allows these passages to be connected across the painting without erasing their separate practical roles.

The table is particularly effective because its outline is not a neutral rectangle presented straight on. Its edges give the foreground a direction, and the nearer woman's body interrupts a clear inspection of the whole. We must understand the surface through portions that remain visible around her arms and shoulders. A familiar object is both established and partly concealed by the people using it.

The relation between her pale back and the tabletop is equally important. Their proximity could flatten the forms together, but changes of colour, contour and adjoining dark passages keep body and furniture distinct. The image can simplify what it shows without making every light area read as the same substance. Skin, clothing, a table and daylight perform different jobs within a restricted range of brightness.

These distinctions give the picture a visual life independent of an imagined conversation. We can follow a contour around a shoulder, across a table edge and towards the sign without learning a new fact about the women's relationship. The time spent looking is productive because the painting supplies relations among surfaces that are not exhausted when its subject has been named.

Dress and public presence

The hats and fitted clothing help distinguish the women as people occupying a public setting, with an appearance prepared for the city beyond the window. Their clothes remain specific enough to matter without identifying a profession.

That distinction is especially important when the picture is discussed as an image of changing opportunities for women. Historical restaurant culture can explain why this kind of meeting became a subject of interest. It cannot, on its own, make the two people secretaries on a lunch break or establish what they think about their independence.

The broad shapes of the clothing also have a compositional role. Green balances the warmer woodwork, the blue hat stands apart from the golden window, and the paler back receives a different emphasis from the facing torso. Fashion is visible as colour and form before it becomes evidence for a social interpretation.

Christie's catalogue identifies Jo Hopper as the model for all three female figures. ^[1] A shared model does not require us to see a literal reflection, a pair of twins or a portrait of Jo dining with herself. A model could supply several poses while the painting gave each figure a different place and role.

Women as customers rather than an invented case history

Patricia Junker's Edward Hopper's Women, organised at the Seattle Art Museum in 2008–09, placed Chop Suey at the centre of a group concerned with women occupying new social spaces in the city. Her exhibition account connects these images with the expanding presence of women in everyday urban work and public life. ^[6] This is a more specific historical frame than a general statement that every quiet Hopper figure is lonely.

Liu supplies a concrete piece of contemporary context through a 1925 newspaper account, quoted in his study, which describes typists, telephone workers and shop assistants using Chinese restaurants for lunch. ^[4] It establishes the plausibility of such customers within the restaurant world Hopper knew. It cannot make the women in this painting members of one of those occupations merely because their clothes look fashionable.

Their visibility is itself a substantial part of the subject. They occupy a table in their own right, with a separate pair in the background rather than a conspicuous chaperone controlling the scene. The composition asks us to give their presence sustained attention, even though it offers little practical information about the day that has brought them there.

That presence need not be reduced to an uncomplicated celebration of freedom. The room can provide an opportunity to meet while also making its customers visible to strangers. Hats, clothing and bodily restraint can serve public presentation and private comfort at once. Hopper does not settle which consideration matters most to either sitter.

Historical interpretation is strongest here when it preserves that complexity. Knowing that women's urban lives were changing helps explain why the image's ordinary occasion could matter. It does not require a fictional biography in which the two women share an employer, a financial predicament or a romantic disappointment. Their status as customers is visible; their membership of a wider social transformation is a question the painting can help us explore.

The question of a real restaurant

The setting has encouraged searches for an exact location. The 2018 auction essay discusses proposed connections with restaurants in Portland, Maine, and with the Far East Tea Garden near Columbus Circle in New York. ^[1] These proposals should remain distinct from a securely identified, unchanged interior.

Furniture, clothing, glazing, woodwork, signage and tableware make the restaurant readily recognisable. Their familiarity makes a literal reconstruction tempting. But a convincing setting can be assembled, adjusted or remembered rather than copied from one fixed viewpoint.

The picture's title is less geographically specific than New York Restaurant. It names the kind of establishment through its advertised food. That gives the scene cultural specificity without providing a street address.

The window's elevated position and large sign help explain how such a place related to the street. They are useful visual clues even when the precise prototype remains unsettled. Identifying the type of space can be more secure than claiming one exact room.

John Sloan and a different dining room

Kelly connects the work with John Sloan's Chinese Restaurant of 1909, noting that Sloan's painting was reproduced alongside an article Hopper wrote about him in 1927. ^[2] The relation places Hopper's subject within an existing interest in ordinary urban dining.

In Sloan's picture, groups of diners and a cat on the floor occupy a more extensively described restaurant interior. Tables, furniture and people accumulate across the room. Looking between the works makes Hopper's selection particularly noticeable: the near women, white table and large window have become a compact arrangement with little peripheral activity.

The comparison does not require the conclusion that Hopper copied a layout. It shows how two painters could make a restaurant legible through different distributions of figures and objects. The subject is shared, while the visual experience changes.

Kelly also stresses the importance of simplified forms and strong colour in Hopper's painting. ^[2] We can follow that point directly in the table, sign, window divisions and exterior bands. Recognisable objects and an assertive pattern occupy the same canvas.

A painter writing about another painter

Hopper's published engagement with Sloan gives the comparison more substance than a resemblance discovered by later viewers. Kelly's catalogue notes identify his article as “John Sloan and the Philadelphians”, published in The Arts in 1927, and specify that Chinese Restaurant was reproduced there. ^[2] Two years before making Chop Suey, Hopper had participated in a public discussion of the painter whose restaurant scene now offers a useful comparison.

It is important to keep the kind of connection precise. A reproduction within an article demonstrates availability and engagement. It does not establish that Hopper set out to correct one composition through another, or that the later canvas illustrates an argument in his prose. The pictures remain independent works with different arrangements of people and space.

The comparison becomes most productive when it returns to visual decisions. Sloan accumulates occupied tables across his interior; Hopper concentrates his foreground group beside a dominating window. A restaurant's public character can be made through numerous encounters, or through the relationship between customers, architecture and a sign. What changes is the distribution of attention, rather than the mere choice to paint ordinary life.

Hopper's interest in Sloan also complicates the image of an entirely self-contained observer detached from other artists. The quiet room developed within a career that included writing, exhibition and professional exchange. Its restraint was not produced in a cultural vacuum. Recognisable city subjects were available to several painters, each of whom could make a different kind of pictorial order from them.

What the drawings do not tell us

The 2018 catalogue quotes Carter Foster's 2013 statement that no preparatory drawings were known for Chop Suey, Automat or House by the Railroad. ^[1] That reported absence limits the changes we can reconstruct. It does not prove the painting arrived without observation or planning.

The finished canvas remains evidence of decisions: what to crop, where to place the table, how to separate the figures and how much of the sign to reveal. Those decisions can be studied without inventing lost sketches or a sequence of imagined poses.

A comparison with Automat is particularly revealing. Its black window returns reflected lights to the interior; here the glass makes exterior signage and daylight prominent. A single customer has become a pair, but adding another person has not made the relationship fully readable.

Collecting and the 2018 sale

The auction provenance records the painting with the Reeds in 1950, the Cohens in 1968 and Ebsworth from 1973. ^[1] Those entries describe its collecting history; they do not supply biographies for the women at the table.

On 13 November 2018, Christie's sold Chop Suey in New York for $91,875,000, including the buyer's premium. The official result listed the buyer as anonymous. ^[7] The figure belongs to that documented sale, rather than a current valuation or a disclosure of the painting's present owner.

The scale of that later attention can easily dominate discussion. In the image, attention shifts between things of very different sizes: a face beneath a hat, a small teapot and letters made to attract people in the street. The sign announces the public place more emphatically than the women disclose themselves. Looking between those elements takes us from a possible conversation to the city's larger pattern of colour, commerce and light.

A portable image and an unrepeatable object

The 2018 sale belongs to the painting's modern history, but the price cannot explain what takes place between the women and the sign. Monetary records describe an exchange of ownership. The image describes a different commercial encounter, in which a teapot, white table and conspicuous advertisement place people within an establishment that remains largely unseen.

Reproduction introduces another distinction. The composition is recognisable at a small scale because large colour areas and bold letters retain their organisation. In a small image, the facing woman's head may seem unusually blank, while the sign becomes almost effortless to identify. On a larger surface, changes in the forms around the head can claim more attention, and the relation between the body and its surrounding architecture becomes easier to follow.

The canvas's proportions also matter. It is a horizontally extended view, but much less panoramic than Nighthawks. The foreground pair occupy a substantial part of its height. They have not been reduced to small inhabitants of a much larger lit room. Architecture presses closely around them, making their physical relation to table, wall and window particularly insistent.

That close fit is one of the painting's lasting achievements. The sign promises a public place that can be named; the women make that place human without making it fully explicable. The two kinds of recognition remain side by side. We know what is advertised more readily than we know what is passing between the people who have come inside.