The eye just scans
along it’ and nothing in it suggests a human eye observing, noticing, taking
an interest. The pole and the hydrant, things that might stand out as
creature-like – a man and a dog, almost – refuse to become protagonists. There is no one else on
the scene at all – no one there to see it, even. What the picture shows is
something that isn’t being looked at Its viewpoint is unoccupied. It is a
view without a viewer.

How’s it done? How can this sight suggest that it’s not being seen by anyone?
Well, there is sheer probability. At this time of day and week there would
likely be nobody around.

This particular moment of light-fall must often
pass without witnesses. (Part of the magic of a clear early morning is that
the world is so intensely visible – never more so – but that very few people
are there to see it.)

But it’s more than that. That’s the visual message of the image, with its parallel
horizontals, its repetitive sequence of units, its long stretch It’s also
the narrative message. The light declares early morning, and the title
specifies early Sunday morning No one is around No one is up and about No
one is awake The street is empty The people in the apartments sleep The
only visible event is the fall of the light. You’re looking at a scene
without consciousness.

And maybe you aren’t there either. “When we were at school,” Hopper
remembered, “we debated what a room looked like when there was no one to see
it, nobody looking in, even…” This is the strangest effect in his
paintings.

He can depict individuals sitting by themselves, or empty rooms,
or deserted streets, and he can suggest that the individuals are absolutely
alone, the rooms and the streets absolutely empty. A third very long shadow falls down the
middle of the pavement, going right across the picture, suggesting that a
tall lamppost stands off-scene, somewhere to the right – or is it a step in
the paving? Either way, the thin bar only ups the sense of continuousness.

Nothing happening. From the curb of the pavement to the
guttering of the roof, it becomes a formation of straight parallel bars. With no dramas of near and far, or of up and down, the scene runs levelly
across the picture.

The shape of the picture, low and long, emphasises the ongoing length of the
street. The doorways and windows make a regular and almost uniform series. It’s not quite uniform – there are small variations among the blinds,
curtains, awnings, hanging signs, the lettering on the shop windows and the
pilasters between them. But there are no big surprises in this sequence, and
no surprises are implied beyond the picture’s edge The scene says “etc”
The sky continues clear from left to right.

Only a perfect square of
featureless brown in the top-right corner, presumably some higher-rising
building behind, punctuates this continuousness.

The lighting tells the time. A cool light casts long shadows across the
pavement from the fire hydrant and the barber’s pole It is early morning
These shadows add extra horizontals. But if you’re after a
view of the world that seems undisturbed by a human viewer, his work is a
certainly a candidate.

Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning shows a stretch of street. It’s a terrace of
two-storey properties, with a line of shop-fronts running beneath a line of
red-plastered apartments It may be a street in New York, where the artist
lived The row is viewed flat-on. She would probably
not have had any time for the art of Edward Hopper. We are only eavesdropping (the visual
equivalent of eavesdropping) on God’s view of the world.

Weil gives no examples Her favourite painter was Giotto. “All great painting gives the
following impression: that God is in contact with its point of view
regarding the world, with the perspective of it, without either the painter
or the person admiring the picture being there to disturb the t?-??.

Whence comes the silence of all great painting.” When we look at such
pictures we are in a sense not there. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation,
which can only be seen from the point where I am But I act as a screen. I
must withdraw so that he may see it.”

And she developed this into a theory of art. I must empty and
annihilate my self, and become a pure, selfless viewpoint – and then I can
see a landscape without me being there Or better still, God can see it
through me.