Hopper made three trips to Paris from 1906 to 1910. He knew people who knew Gertrude Stein but said, "I wasn't important enough for her." His Paris wasn't Hemingway's festive moveable feast but the more brooding, lonely existence of Rilke's alter ego, Malte Laurids Brigge, who wandered the empty streets at exactly the same time, "learning to see." I wish some of Hopper's Paris pictures, like his desolate stairway down to the Seine of 1906, were in the Boston exhibition. Summer Interior gives an idea of what he was capable of in those early years. Trying to guess the artist, you might think the painting was by Pierre Bonnard or Édouard Vuillard. There's a tactile quality missing from a lot of Hopper's later works, in the sheet pulled down from the bed—Hopper was the painter of bedsheets—and the woman's toes just touching the thickly painted shaft of light, like another sheet, on the green floor. The abstract yellow and reddish-brown stripes to the right are presumably a Venetian blind, called a jalousie in French. Some theme of sexual jealousy may be at work in this freeze frame from an unknown narrative.