After working as a magazine illustrator for several years and traveling to Paris on various occasions, by the time he painted Girl at a Sewing Machine in 1921, Hopper had fully consolidated his style. In the center of an urban domestic interior, a young woman with long hair that practically conceals her face is absorbed in working on a sewing machine by a window. The composition recalls similar indoor settings painted by 17th-century artists of the Dutch school, and also certain paintings by John Sloan, such as The Cot, which Hopper could have seen in the exhibition of The Eight in 1907. The present painting also bears a certain resemblance to the artist’s later works, especially the etching East Side Interior, executed in 1922. [http://gandalfsgallery.blogspot.com/]