Ground Swell

Hopper worked on this in the summer of 1939, finishing it in early September, the same weeks Germany invaded Poland and war returned to Europe. It shows four young people in a small catboat riding a long, heavy swell off the New England coast, their attention fixed on a bell buoy that leans and tolls in the rolling water. The rising swell gives the calm afternoon a faint charge of tension, and viewers have long read that mood against the year it was made, though Hopper himself brushed aside any talk of hidden meaning. He was painting a summer he knew well from sailing these waters, tracking in his notebook the exact days he spent on the sea, the boat, and the hard midday light.