I was working at Coracle Press gallery in Camberwell in 1984, a year when there was much analysis of the coming of age of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which of course had been written in 1948. Camden Arts Centre, for example, ran a show titled Nineteen Eighty-Four. Commissioned to produce the catalogue, Coracle came up with the ultimate tribute in the form of a facsimile of the original Penguin edition of the Orwell book.
By coincidence, the gallery would revisit and celebrate a very different creation from the same year, 1948: Edward Hopper’s 7 A.M. This was painting Hopper had made of a shop in upstate New York. The white-painted clapperboard and panelled wooden shopfront is bright and stark in the early morning light, almost ghostly in its disconnection from the dark woodland in the background, where dawn seems yet to arrive. It is, presumably, too early for the shop to have opened; and hard to guess who might come here to buy. There is no obvious product, the meagre window display consisting only of a couple of prints and some bottles. The shelves visible in the interior are empty. It reminds me of a shop converted to domestic use, where a few decorative knickknacks might be put into the display window for a sense of homeliness. But there is a till, and a clock positioned to be more visible to the passer-by than any occupant. Jo Hopper later suggested it might be an outlet for illicit alcohol – a speakeasy, or ‘blind pig’ – which would perhaps explain the bottles.
The painting was completed in September, 1948, and now hangs in New York in the Whitney.
In the early 1980s Simon Cutts, Coracle’s founder and director, was struck by the structural resemblance of the New York shop to the Coracle building in Camberwell. He had the idea of recreating the Hopper on the Camberwell New Road, converting the façade for the period of an exhibition, four weeks or so, into a kind of trompe l’oeil. Stephen Duncalf, a great painter and meticulous craftsman who had already had already had three solo exhibitions at the gallery, was brought in to mastermind the conversion.
Duncalf painted the grey interior shadows, almost horizontal from the low morning sun, across the walls in emulsion. An indistinct brown construction, perhaps a bookshelf, was blocked in on the chimney breast, while the vague shadows of the interior seen through the glazed door were suggested with streaky grey, green and mud-coloured paint applied to the back of the glass. For the bay window, Duncalf installed a back-panel, and set about filling the display area with its oddly peripheral contents. The two pictures were painted, one a portrait, perhaps of a musician with a saxophone, the other a red, blue and brown composition, perhaps a landscape. They were propped against the screen and their shadows painted in, as was an unidentifiable grey rectangle on the back-panel. The curious window non-display was completed with three green bottles, with yellow labels painted on. Duncalf found that wine bottle were insufficient, and sourced what can only be champagne bottles for verisimilitude. The shop’s two principal features, the wall clock and till, were more elaborately crafted from sheet aluminium, with the shadow of the clock that falls into the nook of the chimney breast coming in for special treatment, being shaped in metal as part of the clock’s construction.
The finishing touch was a doorstep built into the alcove of the front door that was part of the original but missing from the Camberwell shop: Duncalf made this of plywood strong enough to stand on, painted to resemble stone, and completed with the signature, ‘Edward Hopper.’ The exhibition ran for the month of October, 1984, when it was never once struck by brilliant sunshine at 7 a.m. But it was a pleasing homage, so subtle to have been almost entirely missed; somehow this added to the satisfaction of the sense of mystery of the New York original having been convincingly transplanted to south London.