Sun on Prospect Street - Gloucester - Massachusetts by Edward Hopper

This magnificent landscape watercolor belongs with poetry to the American Realism movement, which celebrates the clarity and picturesque architecture of New England. The renowned artist Hopper Edward deploys all his artistic craftsmanship in this famous creation entitled “Sun on Prospect Street - Gloucester - Massachusetts” to depict a sunny provincial street. Through this luminous and asymmetrical composition, the painter offers a subtle reflection on the tranquility and purity of coastal light.

A row of elegant dwelling houses with pointed roofs and soft colors lines a wide, sunny, and rising street. In the foreground on the left stands a wooden building painted in yellow ocher, decorated with a covered porch and windows with grayish-blue shutters. Further up the hill, the white and beige facades of neighboring homes line up harmoniously under a hazy, bluish-gray sky. On the street empty of any pedestrian, two vintage-style automobiles, painted in black and dark green, are parked along the sidewalk. The natural and low light brightly illuminates the wooden facades, cutting elongated and geometric shadows.

The painter reveals his exceptional craftsmanship through the watercolor technique, modeling the clarity of the landscape with great fluidity. His remarkable ability to play with transparences and washes of ocher and blue colors lends this urban perspective a lightness and poetry of great realism.