Edward Hopper’s The Camel Hump, 1921

By Emma Fighera ’20

In this 1931 oil on canvas piece, Edward Hopper paints a uniquely shaped hill on Cape Cod, in nearly the same location where he would later build his studio. Though well-known for his depictions of lonely urban scenes, Hopper applies this same carefully ordered compositional style to his portrayals of rural New England, resolving and organizing the essential with in the frame. The painting is of two adjacent hills, which Hopper incites the viewer to animate through its title, The Camel’s Hump. Hopper further enlivens the realistic scene through his use of color, utilizing shades of green, brown, blue, white, black, and pink to bring a lush textural depth to the image. The high contrast of light and shadow in the work lend it an intense value, the late afternoon light itself serving almost as the subject of the piece.

Hopper uses a light green shade at the foreground of the photo, which he darkens progressively through the addition of brown as the hills recede into space. The grass highlighted in the foreground takes on a spark ling, yellow quality, highlighting the time of day, season, and geographical setting of the image. In this way, Hopper captures the quirky and distinctive contours of the dunes, as well as the textural patterns of dark foliage and light sand. Though the piece contains a variety of contrasting visual elements, the landscape still possesses a quiet wholeness, a cohesion that seems paradoxically born out of these tensions in hue and value.

Between the unexpected contours of the dunes, Hopper places the straight tracks of an old rail line, now fallen into disuse. The tracks leading out of this empty place evoke the presence of the people who once traveled within and across it, and who are now gone. This sense of loneliness is characteristic of Hopper, whose empty pes possess an unusual quietude, a feeling of being alone even among other people. While the tracks themselves invoke human presence, they are no longer usable, obstructed by sand and brush. There is thus a feeling of entrapment to this otherwise serene and free-seeming image — you are stuck here. There is no vehicular escape, a quality that enhances this sense of loneliness and isolation essential to Hopper’s work.