The City

An ornate corner building rises close to the spectator, its arched windows and dark mansard roof set against plainer walls. Beyond it, a long brick row borders a park, while taller blocks interrupt the distant skyline. Small pedestrians cross the open ground below. Edward Hopper's The City makes an urban panorama from unequal parts: a strongly individual foreground building, repeated housing, open paths and structures too tall to fit within the view.

The painting dates from 1927 and belongs to the University of Arizona Museum of Art. The museum records oil on canvas, the gift of C. Leonard Pfeiffer, accession 1945.009.023. ^[1] Its broad view is connected with Washington Square in New York, but the city Hopper constructs combines observed architecture with imagined elements.

A high view with something close in front

The elevated viewpoint allows several levels to be seen together. Roofs appear below the horizon, people become small marks on the streets, and the park's paths are legible as shapes on the ground. Yet the painting does not provide an evenly distant survey. The corner building stands much closer than most of the scene, interrupting the panorama with its own volume.

That near presence gives the view a particular rhythm. The eye can begin with detailed windows and roof ornament, move past the building towards the park, and then reach the longer brick row beyond. These are different scales of looking within one composition. The foreground façade rewards close attention, while the streets and skyline require broader recognition.

The view is also cropped in several directions. The closest building continues below the lower edge, and the tall pale wall at the right extends beyond the top. The city seems to exceed the picture both vertically and laterally. Hopper gives us enough of its structure to understand the relationships without enclosing the whole urban environment.

The small strip of sky reinforces this sense of density. Buildings and distant roofs occupy most of the upper field, leaving little open atmosphere above. The park's pale paths consequently become one of the painting's main sources of visual breathing room.

The ornate corner building

The foreground building is the most elaborately articulated object. Its façade curves around the corner, carrying rows of windows and projecting horizontal divisions. The curve helps it turn towards more than one part of the surrounding street, giving the structure a substantial presence rather than a single flat front.

The arched windows establish a distinctive rhythm. Pale surrounds stand against darker openings, with smaller columns and divisions distinguishing one bay from the next. Repetition makes the building coherent, but the curved façade changes the angle at which each opening is seen. The windows belong to a volume that turns in space.

Above, the dark roof introduces dormers, small pediments and changes of pitch. It is much more intricate than the simple outlines of the taller distant blocks. Hopper uses that difference to keep the near building individual even within a city containing many other structures.

A striped awning adds a small warmer accent lower down. Its alternating light and reddish bands differ from the masonry's broader greys and creams. It suggests an ordinary use of the façade without requiring a visible proprietor, shop name or interior to explain it.

The building's side is less ornamental. A large pale wall rises beside the decorated front, making a strong contrast between a public-facing façade and a plainer adjoining surface. The city is not equally embellished on every side. From above, Hopper can bring the difference between display and blank wall into the same view.

A study of arched windows

A charcoal drawing related to the painting appeared at Christie's in 2007. The catalogue dates it to about 1927 and identifies the subject as the arched windows of a Washington Square building represented in The City. ^[2] The sheet concentrates on a much smaller portion of architecture than the finished panorama.

Dark shading gives the arches considerable weight. Short supporting columns and long horizontal divisions organize the façade, while angled strokes indicate recession and shadow. The openings are examined as substantial architectural forms rather than merely marked as repeated dark rectangles.

The drawing makes the attention given to this foreground feature more tangible. In the painting, the ornate building must work both as a close object and as one part of a larger city. A separate study allows its window rhythm and depth to be considered without simultaneously resolving the park, skyline and surrounding blocks.

The comparison also shows how differently a feature can function at two scales. The drawing immerses the viewer in the arches; the oil gives them a place within a turning façade and an extensive urban arrangement. Detailed observation becomes part of a larger act of selection.

The park and the small pedestrians

To the left of the corner building, light streets and paths open around darker green areas. Their angles give the ground a designed pattern, with long pale passages leading between planted shapes. The park is not a distant patch of greenery. It occupies a clearly organized part of the city at the level below the buildings.

Several pedestrians appear within these open areas. Their small dark forms give the paths a human scale without making any one person the subject of a separate story. They can be distinguished as moving or standing presences, but their faces and intentions remain inaccessible from this height.

Their smallness changes the apparent size of the buildings. The foreground façade may first seem like an object that can be grasped through its windows and ornament. The figures below remind us how large that same structure would be when encountered from the street.

The open ground also separates the near building from the brick row beyond. We can follow a passage of lighter space between those built masses. That interval makes the view more complex than an accumulation of adjoining façades: the city contains voids and routes as well as walls.

The long row and the higher blocks

The brick row stretches across much of the middle distance. Its repeated windows and closely related façades make a steadier sequence than the ornate corner building. The warm colour holds the group together, while small differences in the lower entrances keep it from becoming entirely uniform.

Beyond it, lower roofs spread towards the horizon. A taller rectangular block rises near the centre, its isolated upper form making the distance more varied. At the far right, another pale high-rise is cut by the edge, with a vertical series of small windows indicating its much greater height.

The distribution of these forms matters. The most ornate architecture is close; a repeated lower row occupies the middle distance; larger, plainer blocks appear beyond or at the boundary. Hopper has not organized the city into one harmonious style. Different building types compete for space and attention.

The cropped pale wall at the right is particularly forceful because so little of the building is needed to establish its scale. It has less visible ornament than the corner structure, but more vertical reach. A plain surface can therefore challenge an elaborate façade through size alone.

The distant horizon remains comparatively low between the tall blocks. This makes each interruption more apparent. The skyline records uneven growth rather than a continuous wall of skyscrapers, and the older, lower city remains a substantial part of the view.

Washington Square observed and remade

The Whitney's 2022 exhibition account identifies the brick row with the block along Washington Square's northeast edge where Hopper lived. It describes the painting as a creative combination of existing and imagined architecture, bringing together Federal, Gilded Age and modern building types. ^[3]

That account gives a useful limit to topographical recognition. The park and row connect the canvas with a place Hopper knew, but the arrangement should not be treated as an exact map of the square. Its different structures have been made to work within one composition.

The distinction is visible in the painting's concentration. A richly articulated corner, a blank side wall, a long brick row and a cropped high-rise are brought into unusually close conversation. Their differences make urban change visible through scale, ornament and the gaps between buildings.

The Whitney interprets this composite through the rapid modernization of Greenwich Village. ^[3] The painting supports attention to that change through its disparities of scale and style. Yet it also preserves the attraction of individual architectural forms: the arched windows are not simply displaced by the larger blocks around them.

From Rehn's gallery to Arizona

The Museum of Modern Art included The City as number 5 in its 1933 Hopper retrospective. The catalogue identified the painting with Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York. ^[4]

The University of Arizona explains that its art collection began with a founding gift of approximately one hundred paintings from C. Leonard Pfeiffer during the Second World War. Hopper's canvas is identified within that American collection, alongside works by artists including Isabel Bishop, Jacob Lawrence and Stuart Davis. ^[1] The gift placed the New York view within a developing university museum far from its subject.

Its later appearance in Edward Hopper's New York brought the painting back into a concentrated examination of the city he repeatedly reworked. ^[3] The canvas can contribute to that history both as a representation of Washington Square and as evidence of a process that made familiar architecture into an invented whole.

Other elevated views

American Village, painted in 1912, also looks down across streets, buildings and small figures. Its roads and changes of ground level guide movement through a more dispersed settlement. The City compresses its different types more closely, with the foreground corner building partly obstructing the broader view.

City Roofs, from 1932, moves nearer to rooftop level. Chimneys, skylights and a large bulkhead become prominent, while a modern apartment tower rises behind. The ordinary upper surfaces that remain secondary in The City become the later painting's immediate subject.

Here, the foreground arches retain a distinctive role. Their alternating light surrounds and dark openings hold close attention, while the park, brick row and taller blocks extend behind them. Hopper makes the city available through that movement between an individual building and the much larger environment it can never fully contain.