Sierra Madre at Monterrey

Sierra Madre at Monterrey shows the Sierra Madre mountain range in northeastern Mexico as seen from the window of Edward Hopper's hotel room overlooking the town of Saltillo. The scattered man-made structures cut off at the bottom edge of the image are dwarfed by the humped blue and green masses of the rising land forms, their brooding presence made slightly menacing by the dark shadows they cast in the light of a low sun beyond the picture's right edge. The dark profile of the range meets a series of long, narrow cloud-forms with darker undersides. The understated drama of this work is characteristic of Hopper's approach in his watercolors to his common, humble subjects, more typically deserted buildings and other man-made structures in rural and semi-rural settings.

This watercolor was one of a group Hopper made during the first trip he and his wife, Jo, took to Mexico. Most of these works show views taken from a lower vantage point—the rooftop of a house—and focus on the interaction of architecture and the surrounding landscape, a common theme in Hopper's work. In Sierra Madre at Monterrey the buildings, seen only as a haphazard cluster of rooftops, are overwhelmed by the powerful dominating mountains. Hopper had avoided such dramatic landscape subjects on his first trip west, to Colorado and New Mexico, in 1925. But having more recently painted watercolors of purely natural landscape subjects, the artist now found himself attracted by the magnificence of the Sierra Madre.

Sierra Madre at Monterrey exemplifies Hopper's mature technique in watercolor painting. In earlier watercolors, he had painted in washes of color, directly and spontaneously. In the 1940s, his technique became more complex as he built up the medium in layered "glazes" for richer although still translucent color, sometimes then using a knife to scrape down to the paper to create white highlights. This process of reworking the watercolor resulted in the slightly stippled effect visible on the lighter areas of the mountain flanks just left of the center of the composition. By such means, Hopper realized new richness of color and fullness of form in his later watercolor paintings.

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