Audio Stop 7

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A buoy and a sailboat with three men and a woman tip at an angle on rolling aquamarine and azure-blue waves in this horizontal painting. The white wooden boat sails away from us toward the right side of the composition. Its unfurled sail is tinged with taupe and pale blue and attached to a pale wooden mast. The boat has a low cabin with round portholes on the side we can see. Two of the men are shirtless, tanned, and have their backs to us. One sits in the cockpit wearing a white hat with a short brim as he holds the tiller. The other man stands on the deck with his arms crossed. Beyond the standing man, the woman lies along the roof of the cabin, her head at about the height of the man’s chest. She is barefoot and lies on her stomach wearing long, blue pants and a watermelon-pink halter top and matching kerchief covering her hair. The third man stands to her right, his slender body angled toward us while holding onto the mast with one hand and rigging with the other. The woman and third man have noticeably pale skin. A buoy near the boat is battleship-gray with streaks of rust along its base and a copper-green bell inside. It floats just to the left of and tips toward the boat on a rising swell. The scene is lit by bright sunlight coming from the left side of the baby-blue sky with bands of feathery clouds, which takes up the top two-thirds of the composition. The artist signed the lower right, “EDWARD HOPPER.”

Edward Hopper

Ground Swell, 1939

The blue sky, sun-kissed figures, and vast rolling water of Ground Swell strike a calm note in the picture; however, details in the painting call into question this initial sense of serenity. A buoy confronts the small catboat in the middle of an otherwise empty seascape. Its purpose, to sound a warning bell in advance of unseen or imminent danger, renders its presence in the scene ominous. The cirrus clouds in the blue sky—often harbingers of approaching storms—reinforce this impression of disturbance.

Read full audio transcript

SARAH CASH:

It’s really a very simple composition. We have sky, ocean, sailboat, figures, bell buoy.

NARRATOR:

But the painting may not be as calm, and placid, and beautiful as we first assume when we look at it.

Sarah Cash, associate curator of American and British paintings.

SARAH CASH:

For example, the figures on the sailboat are seemingly independent of each other. Not focused on each other. The gaze of each of those sailors is on the bell buoy, suggesting that they’re very concerned that the bell buoy may present to them some kind of danger. The feathery clouds in the blue sky look to our eye just beautiful, and calm, and enjoyable, but, in fact, they can often foretell a coming storm or changing weather.

NARRATOR:

So do the rolling waves—the “groundswell” of the painting’s title—is there a hidden meaning here? Hopper painted this work in 1939, the year a hurricane swept through New England, leaving behind a path of destruction and killing hundreds—but that wasn’t all.

SARAH CASH:

Hopper painted Ground Swell from August of 1939 to September 15th of 1939—exactly the time when news of World War II was broadcast. So, it is entirely possible, that the bell buoy may serve a dual purpose in this painting. It may make us think of dangerous weather; but perhaps it symbolizes in at least a subtle way the coming of World War II.

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