From December 1913 until his death in May 1965, Edward Hopper lived on the fourth floor of 3 Washington Square North. His early neighbors included Collin Cruickshank and Walter Tittle, with whom he had attended art school. At first he lived in a studio apartment in the rear part of the building which faced Washington Muse and had a separate entrance there.. His wife Josephine Nivison joined him there after they were married in 1924. In November 1932 they moved into a larger space, which included two rooms facing Washington Square Park. The larger front room became Hopper's studio. The couple remained in the building for many years, despite Spartan living conditions: they shared a bathroom with neighbors until 1941 and did not have central heating until 1959. New York University sought unsuccessfully to evict Hopper and his fellow tenants in late 1946.

Despite Hopper's long settlement on Washington Square, he depicted the neighborhood only rarely. Between 1926 and 1932, he painted an oil and three watercolors featuring the chimney pots and skylights on his own roof. In November 1932 he celebrated his liberation from the rear studio by creating a charcoal drawing (also in the exhibition, lent by Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and the oil painting shown here, which shows a view looking out across the Square toward Judson Memorial Church. Hopper authority Gail Levin has noted that the artist treasured the new "sense of opening—of openness just outside, that he could look out on, no matter how small his own interior space might be" Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995], p. 258).

Typical of Hopper's approach, he gives no indication of the bustling activity associated with life on the Square, projecting instead a mood of solitude and silence. Hopper's study of the art of Edgar Degas in the 1920s led him to adopt unusual perspectives and angles of vision. As in some of his most evocative city pictures, Hopper pictures a dramatic sky streaked with color hovering about a moody and desolate landscape.