Edward Hopper's Gas, painted in 1940, is usually read as a picture of loneliness. It shows a lone attendant at a country filling station at dusk, three pumps glowing against a wall of dark trees, and a road with no car on it: a place that exists for people passing through, with no one passing. The station and the light on its pumps are both Hopper's inventions.
The man wears a vest and a tie and stands with one hand on the pump nearest him. Behind him the road curves out of sight.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, known as MoMA, bought the canvas in 1943 through the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund and still shows it. It hung in the museum's 1965 exhibition Around the Automobile.
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The loneliness is easy to feel. The station is harder to find, because it never stood anywhere. Hopper built it as a composite of several gasoline stations he had seen.
His wife, Jo, said he had wanted to paint a gas station for a long time.
The station Hopper could not find
Hopper struggled with the picture. His biographer Gail Levin writes that he had trouble finding suitable stations.
The trouble was not a lack of roads. Hopper had owned a car since the late 1920s and used it to reach remote corners of New England in search of subjects. From 1930 he and Jo spent every summer in Truro, a town near the tip of Cape Cod, and in 1934 they built a house there.
What he took from those stations he kept in a drawing and in his memory. The Whitney Museum in New York holds his Study for Gas, a 1940 sheet in charcoal and white chalk, a sketch of a gas station with forest beyond it.
What he could not take from any roadside was the light he wanted on the pumps.
What You'll Discover
Where the light on the pumps comes from.
What hangs on the middle pump.
Who the man at the pump is.
Why no car ever arrives.