Hopper’s Places

Chris’s Grill
San Francisco, 1940

Working from drawings of ordinary restaurants in New York, Edward Hopper painted Tables for Ladies in his studio near Washington Square in 1930. The photo on the following menu from Chris’s Grill and Coffee Shop in San Francisco is reminiscent of the commonplace eatery portrayed on this large canvas now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the grapefruits lined up along the bottom of the window display.

Hopper’s seemingly realistic paintings were often based on actual places. However, his finished artworks look dramatically different, as illustrated in art historian Gail Levin’s marvelous book Hopper’s Places, showing twenty-four of his paintings paired with snapshots of the settings they depict. The photographs are dull and unexciting by comparison, lacking the perspective, light, and rich color that Hopper imposed on the scenes. Crossing the country five times between 1941 and 1955, Hopper spent several months on the road every year, sketching and painting mainstream establishments like Chris’s Grill. By the end, he created a series of unforgettable images charged with personal emotion, expressing the solitude, loneliness, and boredom that he saw embodied in the everyday life of twentieth-century America. He was a great artist who changed how we perceive the modern world. Nevertheless, the people who inhabited these places were probably less detached and more optimistic in real life, as reflected by the cheerful poem on the back of this menu entitled: “Eat, Drink Be Merry—For Tomorrow You May Be Out of Town.”