But a show that brings Hopper's masterpiece (and it is one) to D.C. for the first time does a terrific job of getting us to consider the artist anew. At the National Gallery of Art, "Edward Hopper" understands what an odd duck it has on its hands.

As a fine artist, Hopper (1882-1967) was a slow starter, his career not taking root until he was in his 40s. Before then, when he wasn't giving lessons, he did commercial illustration. By all accounts, he hated it. It can't have helped that his discomfort with the human form is palpable. He would prove far less awkward handling architecture.

We also learn that Hopper himself was unusually tall, 6-foot-7, which has its drawbacks. Hotel beds are too short, bus seats too close together, doorways too low. Chairs clumsily fold your frame.
This combination — conflicted prickliness toward the body, bone-deep knowledge of the hostility of the built environment — bore fruit in his art in most peculiar ways. He was able to employ compositional stretches, subtle manipulations of reality, as psychological tricks.

In "Eleven A.M.," a nearly naked woman leans forward in a chair toward an open window. Her pointy-toed shoes are wedged into a triangle of light on the carpet. In the foreground, a table lamp, its top-heavy body echoing the bright shape on the floor, remains dark.

That's Hopper: implication without incident, a kind of single-frame cinema that rebuffs drama but revels in mood. Consider "Office at Night." A man examines a page under the banker's lamp of his too-small desk. His assistant, picking at the drawer of a too-tall file cabinet, turns toward him in snug-girdled secretarial contrapposto. What could be happening? Nothing. Isn't that enough?

National Gallery of Art, 4th Street & Constitution Avenue NW; through Jan. 21; 202-737-4215. (Archives-Navy Memorial)

Written by Glenn Dixon
Photo by Robert Hashimoto/AFP/Getty Images