A Woman in the Sun with Flowers is Edward Hopper’s attempt to pacify and beautify his seventy-eight-year-old wife, Josephine Nivison.

It isn’t a male gaze if the painting is after your wife right? Wrong. Hopper couldn’t just paint the poor woman as she was. He just had to make her completely naked, and give her cartoon boobs and a fitness guru’s body. You would think that over time, Jo would tire of having her husband project his fantasies onto her via his paintings but I guess it was her way of keeping the muses away, if you know what I mean. Artists aren’t exactly known for their monogamy (Lookin’ at you Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Lucien Freud, etc.). So Jo sacrificed herself, along with her own artistic career to be her husband’s muse. But underneath her compliance was the soul of an artist. She even named a great deal of Edward’s paintings including the infamous Nighthawks. But the fact that he probably would have been nothing without her is of course buried deep down in some misogynistic vault where they put Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and all the other hyper-talented female artists who were expected to make food, not art.

This woman looks about as happy as Jo and Edward were in their marriage - that is to say, not happy at all. They made each other miserable for most of their lives. But it was a codependency thing so they remained married for their entire lives, too. They bickered, they abused (there may have been some slamming of heads into shelves) and they painted. And when it was time for Edward to die, Jo followed less than ten months later. Because what’s the point of living if you have no one to yell at?