Van Gogh’s Lost Sunflower Painting

In October 1888, Vincent van Gogh was already suffering from mental illness when he invited the Paul Gaugin, his friend and artistic mentor, to move in with him in Arles, France.  The two were to share what van Gogh called the “Yellow House”, which was to be the start of a planned artistic community.

According to the letter van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, the artist planned to make twelve paintings of sunflowers to decorate the house, particularly Gaugin’s bedroom.

"I would like to make a decoration for the walls. Nothing but large sunflowers . . .  Well, if I carry out that plan, there will be a dozen panels of them.  The whole thing will therefore become a symphony in blue and yellow.  I work at it every morning from sunrise, for the flowers wilt quickly and it is a matter of doing the whole thing in one go."

Unfortunately, van Gogh had finished only four of the paintings before the two artists had a falling out and Gaugin moved out.  Van Gogh went into a deep depression that ended with his self-mutilation of his ear and his hospitalization.

After being released, van Gogh returned briefly to Yellow House and completed Vase with Five Sunflowers (F459).  Just to make sure that the painting would be terribly confusing to future art history students, the painting—done in January 1889—is also known as Six Sunflowers 1888.  You can count the number of flowers in the painting (right) for yourself.  (Ironically, as you will soon see, the Yellow House was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.)

Van Gogh typically didn’t frame his own works, preferring to leave that to dealers or buyers, but in 1888, when he was preparing to decorate his Yellow House in Arles for Paul Gauguin’s visit, he put extra care into this sunflower still life.  He crafted (or at least had made to his design) a simple, bold orange wood frame that he painted in a complementary tone that was likely to heighten the impact of the vivid yellows and golds of the flowers.  The intention was to create a unified, almost ceremonial presentation of the piece, turning it from “painting” into “altar” for the artistic friendship he hoped to cement with Gauguin.

Only one of the sunflower paintings sold during the artist’s lifetime: Fifteen Sunflowers, which sold to Anna Boch for 400 francs ($1600 today).  The rest were part of the 800-850 paintings and drawings that van Gogh’s brother inherited after the artist died in 1890.   Six months after the artist’s death, Theo died leaving the paintings to his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger who carefully exhibited his work, slowly selling off the paintings as the artist became famous posthumously. 

Vase with Five (Six) Sunflowers was exhibited three times in Holland, then Johanna placed the painting for sale by consignment with her uncle, Cornelius M. van Gogh’s art dealership.  Fritz Meyere-Fierz, of Zurich, purchased the painting in 1908 for £250 and held onto the painting until 1820, when he sold it by consignment via the Paul Vallotton gallery, Lausanne) for £3,200 to Koyata Yamamoto.  (Koyata Yamamoto is not related to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.)

Koyato Yamamoto (seated at left in the photo) was a wealthy cotton textile merchant who purchased the painting on the advice of his friend, the writer and artist Saneatsu Mushanokoji (seated at right).  Shipped to Japan aboard the mail steamer Binna, the painting was exhibited in both Tokyo and Osaka.  At the second exhibition, the heavy frame caused the painting to fall from the wall, slightly damaging the artwork.  Angry at the lack of safety for the painting, Yamamoto vowed to never allow it to be exhibited again, taking the Sunflower painting to his home in residence in the Uchide district of Ashiya.

 After the start of World War II and the Allied bombing raids on Japan, Yamamoto became concerned about the painting’s safety.  He tried to convince a bank in Osaka to store the painting in its basement vault for safety, but the bank, fearful that the damp basement would harm the painting, refused.  Unable to find a suitable location at which to store the painting, Yamamoto left the painting in its usual location, hanging on the wall in the drawing room of his home.

Starting on August 1, 1945, the United States Army Air Force began the largest bombing raids of World War II, on the urban areas of Japan.  Thousands of tons of explosives were ripped on Japanese cities by a fleet of 836 B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers.  In several of these missions, M69 and M47 incendiary bombs were dropped in such a manner as to produce firestorms in Japan’s wooden urban structures and industrial facilities. 

Ayisha was not a major industrial city but an airfield that was a vital part of Japan’s air defense system was located there.  The destruction of this field was an integral part of  Operation Olympic, the planned invasion of Japan that was scheduled for November 1945.  Because of Ayisha’s dense population of wooden structures, it was decided that creating a firestorm would be the most effective tactic to use against the city.  The raid dropped a total of a thousand tons of incendiary devices on the city, causing widespread destruction.  In a sad coincidence, the raid occurred on August 6, 1945, the same day as the first use of an atomic weapon, in the bombing of Hiroshima.  The use of atomic weapons forced Japan to surrender, thus eliminating the need for Operation Olympic.

When the air raid sirens alerted the people of Ashiya to go to the air raid shelters, Yamamoto tried to save his beloved Sunflower painting, but the frame was too heavy for him to move, so he was forced to leave the painting behind.   The home, with all of its contents, was one of 2833 homes destroyed that night.

Yamamoto survived the air raid on Ayisha and remained in Ayisha until his death in November 1963.  He never mentioned his Sunflower painting again.

Japan acquired its second Van Gogh Sunflowers painting—Sunflowers (F457)—in 1987, when Yasuo Goto purchased it at a Christie’s London auction for a then-record-breaking £24.75 million (about $39.9 million USD at the time).  Goto intended it as both a prestige acquisition and a cultural gift to the public, eventually displaying it at what is now the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo.  We can probably safely assume (this time, anyway) that the van Gogh painting will remain safe, since Goto owns the Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company.

The Dollar Princesses

One of the byproducts of the industrial revolution in Europe was the slow death of the great landed estates of the aristocracy.  Steamships and railroads enabled massive imports of cheap grain from the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Russia.  Refrigerated shipping also brought cheap meat and dairy from overseas. 

European grain and meat simply could not compete with the low production costs of the vast overseas farms, especially those in North America.  Even as the price of food dropped, the cost of labor was steadily climbing, cash-hungry parliaments were raising taxes, and even the nature of farming was changing.  While a few aristocratic estates modernized with mechanized plows, fertilizers, and scientific breeding, most of the inbred and undereducated nobles simply refused to do anything different than their grandfathers.

If the aristocrats wanted to continue those leisurely fox hunts across their fields, they desperately needed to locate a new source of money.

Luckily, the same industrial revolution was affecting the United States and this new  industry created the nouveau riche, who were eager to trade money for social position.  If you’ll pardon the pun, it was a marriage made in heaven. 

American “new money” families wanted the social prestige of membership in Europe’s rigid, aristocratic class system while European aristocrats wanted the funds to maintain the estates that were increasingly expensive to run in the industrial age.  So, the crass Americans provided their daughters with dowries sufficient to make them desirable to even the haughtiest of aristocrats.   These rich American brides were referred to as “Dollar Princesses.”

The Dollar Princesses brought in the money and their husbands brought in the drafty ancestral homes, the priceless silver, and the invitations to royal garden parties.  It was—more or less—a fair trade.  This didn’t stop English newspapers, like Puck, from lampooning the marriages, however.

Starting just after the American Civil War, when American fortunes exploded, and lasting until World War I, when the entire European aristocracy system imploded, roughly 350 rich, young American brides provided rich, (mostly young) dowries to their new aristocratic husbands, thus transferring hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s money) to prop up those old noble estates.  The peak of such marriages occurred during the 1880s and 1890s—the Gilded Age.

Jennie Jerome, later Lady Randolph Churchill, was an early example of a “Dollar Princess,” though the term had not yet entered common use when she married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874.  Jennie was born in Brooklyn in 1854, to financier Leonard Jerome, who was known as the “King of Wall Street”.  She was introduced to Lord Randolph during the Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight and, after a whirlwind romance of just three days, they were engaged.  Her father’s considerable fortune helped smooth over any aristocratic concerns about her American birth and it provided the much-needed cash infusion into the Churchill family’s strained coffers.  Not only did Jennie’s dowry save the Churchill Estate, but it can be argued that her son, Winston Churchill, saved all of England.

If Jennie Jerome’s marriage was a whirlwind romance, Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1895 union with the 9th Duke of Marlborough was more of a hurricane, engineered by her formidable mother, Alva Vanderbilt.  Consuelo, heiress to one of the largest fortunes in America, was essentially marched down the aisle as a living trust fund who was intended to shore up Blenheim Palace’s leaky roof and the Duke’s equally leaky bank account.  The bride wept through the ceremony (and those were not tears of joy), while society wits whispered about the “wedding of the century” being less a love match than a high-society merger.  Still, the Vanderbilt millions accomplished their architectural rescue mission, even if the marriage itself crumbled into divorce—proof that, while money could buy a dukedom, it couldn’t always buy happiness.  The saga of this dollar princess is the inspiration for the television show, The Gilded Age.

If you were one of those American heiresses in the late 19th or early 20th century, who had just swapped your posh Fifth Avenue address for a drafty English manor, you had two urgent needs: a lady’s maid who could unpack your trunks without fainting at the sight of all that Paris couture and a portrait by John Singer Sargent.

Sargent was the undisputed Instagram filter of his day—minus the phone, but plus a lot of oil paint and the ability to make even the most nervous sitter look as if she had been born knowing how to carry off a tiara.  That kind of talent made the $5,000 price of a Sargent portrait a bargain (Roughly $177,000 in today’s dollars!)

So, why Sargent?  Well, he was the portraitist of choice for anyone who wanted to announce, “I have arrived,” without having to shout it over tea at Claridge’s.  His brushwork had a way of making pearls gleam, gowns ripple, and the sitter’s expression hover between approachable charm and “I summer in the south of France.”  For an heiress, commissioning Sargent wasn’t just about vanity—it was a social credential, the equivalent of having one’s own heraldic crest or of getting a glowing profile in Vogue.  The portrait of Jennie Churchill above is by Sargent.

The families themselves weren’t shy about it, either.  While the official purpose of the portrait was to “capture the likeness for posterity,” it also served as an elegant, full-length calling card.  When a Sargent painting of ‘Lady So-and-So’ was unveiled at a London salon, it might as well have been accompanied by a discreet footnote:  “Yes, the family’s finances are once again in order, thank you, and the young lady is available.”

Sargent painted these women with a knowing blend of flattery and truth.  He understood the subtle alchemy they represented—American steel, railroad, or banking money poured into Old World titles and estates.  Often, the dollar princess, herself, was more modern, witty, and independent than her aristocratic husband’s family quite knew what to do with.  Sargent let just a glimmer of that spark peek through: the tilt of a head, the faintest smile, a glint in the eye that seemed to say, “Yes, I paid for the roof, and no, I don’t regret it.”

And how many did he paint?  Roughly two dozen confirmed dollar princess portraits are  scattered today among major museums, family estates, and auction houses.  In every one, you can see why these women paid (or had their fathers pay) the equivalent of a small townhouse for the privilege.  The gowns may be Edwardian and the backdrops might be grand, but there’s a hint of steel under the satin—exactly what Sargent knew to show.

Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1903 portrait (right) by John Singer Sargent is the very picture of aristocratic poise—though knowing her story, you can almost imagine her thinking, “If only I could trade this tiara for a ticket back to New York.”  Draped in sumptuous satin and crowned with the Marlborough jewels, she stands like the perfect Edwardian duchess she was trained (or coerced) to be.  Sargent, ever the diplomat with a paintbrush, caught her elegance without betraying the fact that her marriage to the 9th Duke was about as warm as a Blenheim Palace corridor in February.  The result is dazzling—she looks every inch the society goddess—but if you look closely, you might detect the faint glimmer of a woman who knew she had rescued a palace roof (And knew she had  provided the requisite “heir and a spare”!) yet found her own happiness leaking away.

In the end, a Sargent portrait was less about recording a face than about sealing a chapter of social history. The dollar princesses’ marriages may have been transactions, but on Sargent’s canvases, they became triumphs—proof that money, titles, and art could meet on equal terms…at least for the span of one dazzling sitting. 

Educational Immortality

Yesterday, I received a very kind letter from a former student.  Besides the incredibly large salaries and the vast and well-furnished office spaces given history professors, this is the best reward you receive for a couple of decades teaching. 

My former student is now teaching high school history and says that in referring back to her old college notes, she was surprised to realize that parts of her own history lectures were repeating things she had heard in my classroom.  This doesn’t surprise me at all since I long ago realized that most of the lectures that I wrote contained many of the same elements that I had heard while a student of Ray Sadler and Charles Harris, my favorite history professors.  While teaching, I probably unknowingly quoted them on a daily basis.

Ever catch a teacher tossing out a phrase that feels like a blast from your own school days?  Maybe it’s “The Puritans didn’t come to America to escape persecution, they came to start it.” or a quirky quip like, “The perfect classroom is a log with a student on one end and a teacher on the other” (shoutout to Mark Hopkins for that gem).  Have you ever wondered why new teachers sound like echoes of their old ones? Spoiler Alert: it’s less about time travel and more about human nature, nostalgia, and cognitive imprinting.

Picture this: you’re a student in a stuffy classroom, doodling in your notebook, when your professor drops a line so catchy it sticks like gum on your shoe.  Fast-forward a couple of decades, and now you’re the professor, standing at the front of the room, and—bam!—out pops that same phrase.  It’s like your brain hit the rewind button.  So, how does this happen?

For starters, we humans are natural mimicry machines.  From the moment we’re born, we copy what we see—whether it’s a parent’s smile or a teacher’s stern “Eyes on me!”  Students spend years watching their teachers like hawks, soaking up not just math or history but also their teachers’ quirks, catchphrases, and classroom vibes.  When those students grow up to become teachers and professors, those patterns are already hardwired.  It’s like muscle memory for words.  Psychologists call this “modeling,” but let’s be real—it’s just us stealing our teachers’ best lines like crows snagging shiny trinkets.

Then there’s the nostalgia factor.  Remember that one teacher who made algebra feel like an adventure, or history became so real that you dreamt of it at night?  Their words—say, “The only limit is your imagination!”—get etched into your brain, tied to warm fuzzies or those lightbulb moments.  When you’re a teacher facing a room of blank stares, those phrases bubble up like a trusty playlist, ready to inspire (or at least fill the awkward silence).  It’s not just habit—it’s a little love letter to the teachers who shaped you.

Becoming a teacher isn’t just about writing good lectures and putting together that killer PowerPoint.  Instead, it’s like stepping into a cultural relay race.  Teacher training programs and school staff rooms are like cozy clubs where teachers swap stories, strategies, and yes—sayings.  New teachers, eager to fit in, often lean on the lingo of their own mentors or that of the veterans down the hall.  If your old history teacher loved saying, “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes,” you might find yourself dropping that line to sound wise (and because it’s just so darn quotable).

Classrooms also have a knack for triggering déjà vu.  A student’s cheeky question or a chaotic group discussion can feel eerily familiar, like a rerun of your own school days.  Your brain digs into its archives and pulls out a phrase your old professor used in a similar spot because it feels right.  It’s not lazy—it’s your mind saying, “Hey, this worked back then, let’s try it now!”

So, why do teachers lean on these recycled gems?  First off, they trust them.  If your science teacher’s “Measure twice, mix once” got you through lab experiments, you’re betting it’ll help your students nail their projects, too.  These phrases are like comfort food—reliable, familiar, and crowd-pleasing.    Falling back on a tried-and-true saying is like grabbing a life raft in a stormy sea of whiteboard markers.  (Personally, I always preferred the old chalkboards—I’m a traditionalist.)

There’s also a deeper reason: teaching is a legacy game.  Teachers and professors are part of a big, beautiful chain, passing down wisdom and insights like family heirlooms.  When a teacher repeats, “A log with a student on one end and a teacher on the other,” they’re not just quoting Mark Hopkins (via a speech made by one of his students, President James Garfield, circa 1871).  They’re sharing a belief that real learning happens through connection, not fancy gadgets.  It’s like preferring a blackboard to a white board—old-school, but it still works. 

And let’s not forget identity.  For many professors, their career choice was sparked by a rock star teacher who made school magical.  Repeating their words is like channeling that inspiration, a way to say, “I’m carrying your torch.”  It’s less about copying and more about honoring the teachers who not only made you want to teach but made the subject important.  Long after a teacher has retired, his words live on in the classroom.

This echo effect is, well…effective. Studies, like those by researchers Zeichner and Gore, back in 1990, show that new teachers often lean on their own school experiences to shape their style—phrases included.  It’s not just nostalgia—it’s practical.  Our brains love shortcuts (hello, cognitive fluency!), so when you’re scrambling to explain the Protestant Reformation to students who could not care less, you resort to using the same phrases that explained the subject to you.

Let’s circle back to that Mark Hopkins quote about the log, the student, and the teacher.  It’s the kind of line that sticks because it’s profound yet simple, capturing the heart of teaching: connection.  When a former student-turned-teacher repeats it, they’re not just parroting words.  They’re passing on a philosophy that says, “It’s about us, not the stuff.”  It’s why teachers keep echoing their mentors—it’s a way to keep the magic of learning alive, one catchy phrase at a time.

So, the next time you hear a teacher drop a familiar line, smile. It’s not just words—it’s a time capsule and a little piece of their own school days sneaking into the present.  And who knows? Maybe one of their students will grow up, grab a whiteboard marker (or a piece of chalk), and keep the echo going.  After all, teaching isn’t just a job—it’s a conversation that spans generations, one log at a time.

Ration Rationing!

 For the last couple of weeks, most of the email generated by this blog has concerned those government-run grocery stores proposed by the New York Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.  If I eliminate the usual hate mail—which I have graded and returned—the rest is about split between those who are positive that it won’t work and those who are eager to see the experiment implemented, as long as it is done far from their homes. 

A very small number of people pointed out that, while there were several examples of small government-run grocery stores in food deserts, there weren’t any examples of large-scale government-operated food stores.  That’s true:  I can’t find a single good example—but I found something fairly close:  an example of the government’s intending to do good, but ending up distorting a very large market.

At the start of World War II, Great Britain found itself in a dangerous position:  The island nation had to import two-thirds of its food under normal circumstances and German submarines threatened to cut off the food supply, so the British government implemented a strict rationing system for hard-to-obtain foods.  Ration books were issued, a point system for meat, tea, sugar, and fats was established, and propaganda cartoons featuring Doctor Carrot and Potato Pete urged civilian compliance.

The rationing system insured that the army received sufficient food to continue to fight, guaranteed that no one starved, and (most importantly) insured that everyone in the country believed that, regardless of an individual’s wealth or position, no one got more than their fair share of the available food.  The English class system made that last point particularly important.

Surprising many, British food rationing did not stop immediately after the war’s end due to a combination of economic hardship and global instability.  The country was deeply in debt, with its economy drained by six years of war.  Imports had to be paid for in scarce U.S. dollars, which limited access to foreign food.  At the same time, British domestic agriculture, though improved during the war, could not yet fully meet demand.  The Labour government that was elected in 1945, prioritized fairness and full employment over market liberalization and viewed rationing as a way to ensure equitable distribution during recovery.  Bureaucratic inertia and fear of inflation also delayed reform.  Rationing, while unpopular, was seen as a stabilizing measure for when and if the economy and supply chains could recover.  Thus, not only did the rationing not stop after the war, but bread was added to the list of controlled items.

In short, keeping rationing in place seemed both safer and fairer to the Labour government that did not fully trust or believe in a free market, so it continued to control both production and distribution of food.  Producers, guaranteed a stable price for their goods, saw little reason to risk investment in either innovation or expansion.

The rationing system was a form of price and supply controls and while such draconian measures were a necessary evil during the war, they were a huge mistake after the war.  Wage and price controls inevitably lead to market inefficiencies such as shortages and a drop in the quality of goods delivered.  As the government increasingly manages coupons instead of increasing productive activity, labor and capital are misallocated.  The end result of such economic policies is always a shortage of goods and the development of a black market that sells goods at a high price.

As Milton Friedman said, "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.”

By maintaining wartime controls during peacetime, Britain dramatically slowed its own economic recovery.  Rather than letting the market rebuild supply chains and incentivize production, the government suppressed price signals, reducing incentives for farmers and importers to innovate or try to increase efficiency in both agriculture and distribution.  At the same time, the government wasted money and manpower maintaining a large bureaucracy to enforce the rationing.

Though rationing was meant to ensure fairness, an economist like Milton Friedman would argue that forced equality through rationing reduced overall welfare.  He would say it's better to allow prosperity to rise, even if unequally at first, than to hold everyone down to the same artificially low level of consumption.

By the late 1940s, the British public was weary of prolonged austerity. Rationing, initially accepted as a wartime necessity, became increasingly unpopular as peace returned. Restrictions on staples like meat (8 oz weekly), butter (2 oz), and sugar (8 oz) felt oppressive, especially with limited variety and long queues.  Housewives, in particular, were vocal about the burden, with some forming groups like the British Housewives’ League to protest rationing and price controls.

Ironically, though the British and the Allies had won the war, English food rationing lasted years longer than in any other European nation—including in Germany, who had lost the war.  France ended food rationing in 1949, and Poland, Belgium, and Germany, in 1950.  In 1951, Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party were returned to power with a promise to end economic controls, including rationing.  England finally ended all food rationing in 1954.

Though rationing lasted almost three times as long as the war, food consumption in Great Britain returned to prewar levels within a few years after rationing ended.

Why Not Government Grocery Stores

 By now, most Americans know that the Democratic Party candidate for Mayor of New York has included a proposal for opening five municipally-owned stores—one in each borough—as part of his 2025 mayoral campaign.  Not surprisingly, the proposal meets with the approval of several of the more liberal Democrats, prompting Senator Elizabeth Warren to proclaim on CNBC, “It’s a new and fresh plan for New York City, but it’s been tried in other cities around the country and has had some real successes.”

That news surprised me, so I decided to look a little closer at the history of government-run grocery stores.  Spoiler Alert:  Senator Warren speaks with a forked tongue.

Though I searched, I cannot find any large American metropolitan area that has tried a government-run grocery store.  Government-run grocery stores in the United States have been attempted in various forms, primarily in small towns and rural areas, with mixed results. 

• Erie Market, (Erie, Kansas).  When the town’s only grocery store threatened to close in 2020, due to Covid restrictions, the town stepped in and purchased the store.  After four years of operating at a loss, the town leased the store to a private company.
• Baldwin Market, (Baldwin, Florida).  A city-owned grocery store operated for five years but closed in 2024.  Even though the store operated at a loss, the store faced declining patronage as customers found cheaper prices at private stores.
• Rise Community Market, (Cairo, Illinois).  As one of six stores the state opened up in food deserts (defined as a rural community of at least 500 residents, located more that 10 miles from a retail store), Rise is still open, though local residents complain of high prices and empty shelves.  Despite millions of dollars in subsidy, four of the state-run stores have closed. 
• St. Paul Supermarket, (St. Paul, Kansas).  The store, owned by the municipality, is considered a success due to strong community buy-in, motivated by the need to retain residents and attract new ones.  The store generates a profit slightly above the average for rural grocery stores, which has been attributed to local support and effective management.  Community engagement, local management, and the store’s role as a retention and recruitment strategy for the town are the keys to the store’s success.  However, its small scale (serving a population of ~600) limits its applicability to larger urban settings.

The only other grocery stores that I could find that might be considered state-run were tribal stores on Native Reservations and military commissaries on military bases.  Unless I missed something, that’s it.  Note that all of these stores were attempted in rural areas—none were located in urban settings.

In 2023, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a plan for municipally-owned and operated grocery stores to fight urban food deserts (with “food desert” defined as an urban area more than a mile from a grocery store).  After completion of a feasibility study, the plan was abandoned.

Besides noting that no large urban city has successfully run a state-owned and operated grocery store, there are good economic reasons why such a store would be doomed to failure.  Government-run stores disrupt the natural price signals and competition that drive the greatest efficiency in private markets.  Unlike private grocers, who optimize supply chains and quickly respond to changing consumer demand, government entities often lack both the expertise and the incentives to operate efficiently, leading to higher costs and wasted resources. 

Let me put that another way:  Economists, like Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek, would argue that markets allocate resources better than centralized planning.   Government stores risk misallocating resources by prioritizing political goals over economic viability.  Misallocated resources lead to inefficiency, which leads to higher costs.

Government-owned stores also crowd out private investment.  The best way to eliminate a food desert is to provide incentives for private investment.  Subsidized stores can undercut prices, discouraging private investment in grocery retail, especially in underserved areas, in a business in which profit margins are already thin (1-3% in the industry).  A government-owned store, though poorly run and losing money, may still attract sufficient customers to deter a private store from opening.

Government-run stores inevitably limit consumer choice by offering fewer products or by stocking lower quality goods due to bureaucratic constraints or budget limitations.   (Remember back in 2012, when New York City wanted to ban soft drinks larger than 16 ounces?)  Private grocers, driven by profit motives, are incentivized to cater to diverse consumer preferences or to innovate new services.

While we lack US examples of urban government grocery stores, there are ample international examples:  Vietnam, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba have all experimented with government grocery stores.  All promised lower prices by eliminating profits.  The bottom line, however, is that all either failed outright (Venezuela and Cuba) or depended on steadily increasing government financial support.

One last point about government-run grocery stores:  For years, big box discount stores like Sam’s have tried to open stores in all of the five boroughs of NYC.  Each time, the City has blocked such moves with prohibitive zoning or land use regulations.  In each case, the reason for blocking the new stores was to protect existing small businesses,  such as bodegas and neighborhood stores.  So, if Walmart tries to compete with them, it’s “predatory capitalism”, but if a government agency does it with taxpayer money, it’s “enlightened socialism”?

There are currently over a thousand retail grocers in New York City, each of them competing for customers by offering different levels of services and prices.  The idea that the city, with limited purchasing power, with no experience in the market, and with  no profit incentive could really compete with lower prices sounds exactly like the kind of pie-in-the-sky idea a thirty-year-old candidate with no real work experience might propose.

Trains of Thought

This is a topic I wish I could discuss with Fred Dabney.  Fred was a Renaissance Man— somebody who knew just about everything about anything.  Fred’s been gone a while now, but I still miss going to the radio station where he worked the graveyard shift, playing jazz all night long.  We’d drink coffee while discussing the news coming off the teletype.  

If there was one topic that Fred was really an expert on, it was trains.  I like trains and probably know as much about them as the next historian, but I can’t tell you the difference between a 4-2-0 and a 4-6-0 steam locomotive.  Fred could talk about that for days.  (I’m lying—I do know the difference but could only talk about it for a couple of minutes.)  I wonder what Fred would say about Edward Hopper’s fascination with trains.

Yes—Edward Hopper, the American artist, whose paintings primarily explore themes of isolation, solitude, and the alienation of modern life.  His work often depicts stark urban and rural scenes—empty diners, gas stations, theaters, or lone figures in rooms—with everything bathed in dramatic light and shadow.  These settings evoke a sense of loneliness, quiet contemplation, or disconnection, that reflect the emotional undercurrents of early-to-mid-20th-century America.  The most famous of his works is Nighthawks (1942).

If you’ve ever stared at a Hopper painting and felt an odd sense of loneliness, introspection, or the creeping suspicion that the guy at the diner counter is thinking deeply about the futility of it all… congratulations.  You’ve been Hoppered.  But amidst his sunlit isolation and moody diners lies another, often overlooked motif: the train.

That’s right—Edward Hopper’s trains are more than just steel and steam and they are not merely background scenery or a means to get from here to there.  Instead, they are symbolic workhorses, quietly chugging away with emotional freight.  Whether nestled on a track behind a country house or slicing through a gloomy overcast landscape, Hopper’s trains whisper stories about time, distance, longing, and that deeply American itch to move—even if we're not sure where to.

Let’s begin with the basics.  Trains are literal vehicles, but in Hopper’s world, they are also emotional vehicles—rolling metaphors for departure, arrival, waiting, and wondering.  For a man obsessed with stillness, Hopper had a surprisingly kinetic undercurrent running through his work.  Trains, in this context, act as symbols of transition, offering movement in otherwise frozen moments.

Take Railroad Sunset (1929), in which a lone signal tower basks in a garish sunset, and the track extends out of sight to both sides of the painting. Paradoxically, the train, itself, is absent—conspicuously so—but the train is missing in many of Hopper’s “train” paintings.  The glowing sky suggests that the train is either coming or has just gone.  It’s a portrait of in-betweenness, of anticipation hanging in the air like steam from an engine that’s just passed.  Here, the tracks (and the train we can only imagine) become a symbol of a dividing line—between day and night, solitude and contact, home and elsewhere.

It’s impossible to talk about Hopper’s trains without addressing the American mythology of the railroad.  Trains helped tame the West, connected small towns, and served as backdrops for tearful goodbyes and hopeful hellos.  In the collective American psyche, they are almost spiritual. They represent progress—and its discontents.

In Chair Car (1965), Hopper paints the inside of a railway car with passengers scattered like chess pieces.  No one speaks.  Everyone stares out the window or into space, even though nothing can be seen out the windows.  The seats are plush, the lighting is warm, and yet—there’s a heaviness.   The passengers are traveling together, but they are also clearly traveling alone. Are these people going somewhere? Or are they merely enduring the ride?  Is the train even moving?

Hopper’s trains aren’t the heroic beasts of industrial triumph ushering in a new age. They’re more introspective.  They reflect a deeply personal American contradiction: the desire to roam versus the longing to belong.  The train offers escape, yes—but it also implies disconnection.  It moves, but it never promises arrival.

In Hopper’s universe, even train stations throb with symbolism.  Consider Approaching a City (1946).  The canvas shows the view from a train approaching an almost featureless tunnel beneath looming urban buildings.  The city feels impersonal and closed off, without a single person visible.  The viewer doesn’t get to see the other isolated people inside the train; we only see the train’s passage—the mechanical act of entry into something unknown.

The station—normally a place of hustle, ticket stubs, welcoming kisses and final embraces—is stripped of both motion and emotion.  Hopper often preferred to paint the moments before or after the train arrives. Waiting is a recurring mood.   It becomes a metaphor for human existence: we’re always waiting for something—love, clarity, purpose, or perhaps the next train out of town.

Even The Camel’s Hump (1931), which features no train at all, but merely a glimpse of rail line in a rural setting, carries the ghost of movement. Hopper once said he was interested in the “sad desolation of a railroad track.”  That track, curving off into nowhere, becomes the physical embodiment of uncertainty.  The setting for this painting is in Massachusetts, near Hopper’s studio.  Did the abandoned tracks symbolize isolation to the artist?

A recurring theme in Hopper’s paintings is the view from the window—and nowhere is this more poignant than when one is seated on a train.  The window becomes a moving frame, slicing the world into a series of digestible vignettes.  The train window is both a portal and a barrier: it allows the viewer to see out, but not to engage.  This is peak Hopper—engaged detachment.

In Compartment C, Car 293 (1938), a young woman sits reading, oblivious to her surroundings.  She is the embodiment of the solitary traveler.  Outside the window, the world slips past unacknowledged.  It’s a quiet meditation on interior life amid exterior motion.  That the compartment is labeled and numbered—"Car 293"—hints at the industrial impersonality of modern travel.  And yet, inside, it’s deeply human, even if isolated.

Let’s not ignore the fact that many of Hopper’s train-centric works feature solitary women—reading, gazing, traveling.  In a time when women's mobility was becoming more socially acceptable, trains offered independence.  These female figures often look lost in thought, but they also exude a kind of quiet autonomy.  Hopper doesn’t portray them as helpless waifs or glamorous adventuresses, instead, they’re ordinary women in extraordinary states of self-possession.  The train offers a space for personal freedom, though it carries a heave dose of isolation.

In many Hopper paintings, time stands still.   But the presence of trains—whether visible or just implied—serves as a reminder that time is always passing.  The train tracks lead somewhere.  The people are en route to some place.  The signal tower is lit for something expected.

There’s a gentle irony to this: Hopper, the painter of frozen moments, uses the symbol of the train—a machine of relentless motion—to underscore stillness.  The train is always coming or going, even if we never see it.  It’s the heartbeat beneath the surface of his quiet worlds.

Ultimately, Hopper’s trains aren’t about transportation—they’re about transformation.  They represent the soul in transit, the mind on a journey, the heart caught between departure and destination.  They’re symbols of possibility and loss, of progress and estrangement, of the uniquely human condition of being neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.

And let’s face it: there’s a bit of wistful romance to the whole thing.  Who hasn’t watched a train slip past and thought, “Where is it going?  Should I be on it?  Would that solve anything—or just change the view from the window?”

Edward Hopper’s trains are subtle but powerful. They carry with them more than people—they carry questions.  Are we moving toward something, or away from it?  Are we passengers in our own lives?  Will the conductor ever explain the delay?

So, the next time you see a train in a Hopper painting, don’t just admire the brushwork.  Lean in.  Listen for the low clickety-clacking rumble of thought.  It may be whispering something you’ve felt but never put into words.

And if all this seems like a huge load of symbolism to load onto just a few tracks and a quiet car, remember—Hopper’s real subject was never actually the train.  It was always us.