For a man who insisted he didn’t paint narratives, Edward Hopper’s work sure inspires a lot of them.

Like with this painting, Western Motel. Viewers agree on the very basic visual elements of the piece — a woman, on a bed, in a hotel room, feat. mountains, a car, and some very stylish blocked light— but once we meander beyond the land of verifiable visual fact and into the sketchy land of *narrative,* things kinda fall off the deep end. Viewers launch into theories with all the gusto of Sherlock setting off to solve a murder. Is this mysterious and beautiful woman leaving the hotel? Did she just arrive? Is she waiting for someone, looking at someone, or is she all alone? The bed is made, the bags packed; is she running away from something? Or running to something? Is she having an affair? Is it with the bellhop? And on and on and on.

But: a painting ain’t a photo. And no matter how intensely we scrutinize every detail of Hopper’s work, there’s no way to come to a conclusion of verifiable fact. It’s art. Art is subjective. Besides, arguably, much of the appeal of Hopper’s paintings lies in their ambiguity, their openness to our own personal psychic projections and interpretations.

Western Motel is one of several pieces Hopper completed featuring hotels, a sort of artistic obsession for him during his career. They crop up again and again in his work, especially throughout the 1940s and '50s. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts found enough hotel Hopper content to put on an exhibition of over sixty of his paintings, drawings, watercolors and illustrations.

Some of the hotels Hopper painted were creations of his imagination but many were personal, reflections of his travels with his wife, artist and manager Jo Divinson, who in many ways, is the entire reason we know about this piece today. Not just because she allowed Hopper’s career to take priority over her own— despite the fact that critics had lauded her work over artists as significant as Georgia O’Keeffe and John Singer Sargent— but because she got him one of his first significant shows and continued to manage his career for the entirety of their relationship.  She was also the model for Western Motel, along with many other Hopper pieces, and Hopper frequently used her extensive diaries on their travels as source material for his work. But even though Western Motel may not have existed without her help, it is Edward’s name, not Jo’s, that viewers will remember. For better or for worse— as in marriage, so in art. 

If you’re a true Hopper fanatic, there’s an entire book you can use to recreate some of their journeys, following their personal itineraries-- plus a hotel that exclusively features rooms that are real-life reproductions of this very painting. (Only mildly creepy.)