Western Motel (Study)

  • 1949
  • charcoal on paper
  • 8-7/16 x 10-15/16 inche
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Throughout his career Hopper painted people on the move, coming or going, the packed bags were used as a compositional element.

Brian O’Doherty, describing the woman in Western Motel says: “ The eyes of the only person in Hopper’s mature art who returns our gaze are filmed and sightless. We are acknowledged but virtually unseen. Indeed, so powerful is the inner removal of Hopper’s people that we take on some of their intimate distance as we look.”
O’Doherty, Hopper’s 89

Western Motel was painted in January or February of 1957 in California, where Hopper had been given a six-month residency at the Huntington Hartford Foundation.

Western Motel, 1957, oil on canvas, 30-1/4 x 50-1/8 inches

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903
The exhibited drawing is an early conception of the finished painting and helps explain the process of simplification through which Hopper developed his final idea.There is a preliminary drawing at Yale and two other related drawings. This drawing is reproduced in the catalogue raisonné, figure 355.1, page 358.