People in the Sun

Four seated figures occupy a row of canvas chairs lined up before a plain white building, their backs mostly turned toward a wide stretch of desert ground that rises into distant mountains under an open blue sky. One man's gaze lifts beyond the group toward the far horizon, as if the empty terrain holds more interest than the company around him. The scene was painted in 1960 in oil and is held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it entered the collection as a gift from S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. Edward Hopper (1882–1967) worked within American realism, and his painting Cape Cod Morning shows a similar interest in quiet, isolated settings. Worth noticing is how the chairs are arranged almost identically, giving the group a stiff, uniform posture despite the openness of the landscape stretching out before them.