Now that we have talked a bit about the artist himself, let’s move on to a very important part of his life and work, which would be his wife. The woman in Woman in the Sun is not an unknown figure, it is Josephine Hopper. If you look at a Hopper piece that depicts people, like Woman in the Sun, chances are, his wife Josephine modeled for those people. Now we may assume that because she modeled for him, we could say their marriage was happy. But this would just be a straight up lie. It was very tumultuous and oftentimes violent. Despite this, one thing to note is that they stayed together until Edward Hopper’s death. Not only that, but they had one very important thing in common, which is that they both painted. However, because of this, Jo found herself almost fading into irrelevance after their marriage, as Ed got all of the fame with pieces such as Nighthawks. This undoubtedly caused some friction in a relationship between two very different people; they were very divergent personality-wise. The quiet Ed would often get into intense verbal exchanges with his more assertive wife. A great window into this marriage would be sketches that Edward Hopper did of their arguments. He would leave these sketches out for Jo to look at and attempt to get a rise out of her. An example of one of these sketches shows Ed sitting in a recliner silently as an angry Jo is yelling at him for something. The caption below reads “he cannot choose but hear.” Although these sketches give us only one point of view, it is more than enough evidence to prove that it was a rocky relationship.