The Empire Chop Suey in Portland, Maine, where the Hoppers spent the summer of 1927, boasted a similarly striking sign - 24ft high and weighing 600 pounds - to the one that features so prominently in the painting.

The Far East Tea Garden, located at 8 Columbus Circle on New York City’s Upper West Side, was a second-floor spot that Hopper and his wife Josephine frequented in the early years of their marriage. While some of his contemporaries focused on the flamboyant flapper set, Hopper trained his eye on the quieter, quotidian dramas unfolding in unpretentious places such as Chinese restaurants, automats and diners.ĭerived from the Cantonese phrase tsap sui, meaning ‘odds and ends’, chop suey restaurants had by the mid-1920s evolved into popular luncheonettes where the new working class could grab a bite to eat. Hopper’s oil paintings were often a result of a combination of his past experiences, and it is thought that Chop Suey was partially inspired by two restaurants the artist visited in the 1920s. Although his style would transform over time, Hopper never abandoned Henri’s central teaching: to paint the city and street life he knew best. In his early years Hopper studied painting at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, the leader of the Ashcan School, which emphasised a gritty realism. Chop Suey (1929), the most iconic painting by Hopper left in private hands, epitomises the psychological complexity for which his work is celebrated, freezing in place an everyday scene from an America that was changing rapidly. As art historian Robert Hobbs has written, American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was concerned above all ‘with general human values’, using art ‘as a way to frame the forces at work in the modern world’.

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