NEW YORK.- Sotheby’s sale of American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture will take place on November 29th and will feature major paintings by Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell among others. Also to highlight the sale are paintings by Mary Cassatt and Charles Sheeler, as well as an important modern sculpture by Paul Howard Manship. The paintings, drawings and sculpture are to be exhibited at Sotheby’s New York from November 25th to the 28th.

Edward Hopper’s Hotel Window - Edward Hopper’s 1955 oil painting Hotel Window is a classic example of Hopper’s evocative exploration of the theme of isolation in American urban life in the 20th Century. Depicting an elegantly dressed older woman seated on a navy couch in an anonymous hotel lobby staring absently out of a darkened window, the large-scale (40 by 55 in.) canvas expresses the loneliness and alienation that defined not only a certain aspect of American experience, but also, in the artist’s phrase, the “whole human condition”. The presale estimate is $10 to 15 million.

Discussing Hotel Window, Dara Mitchell, Sotheby’s Director of American Paintings, has written: “Hopper’s bold, realist style and distilled compositional format reinforce the psychological power of Hotel Window and have close connections to many elements of film noir. The stark light, spare setting and lone female figure create an atmosphere of unease and emptiness which characterized this genre’s particular brand of human disconnection. Self-imposed solitude, the result of the individual’s disappointment in human interaction, was a societal ill that defined the American experience as depicted by both Hopper and the auteurs of contemporary fiction and film. Hopper’s interest is not in telling a story, however, it is in the single image and its evocative possibilities”.

Of Hotel Window Edward Hopper himself wrote: “It’s nothing accurate at all, just an improvisation of things I’ve seen. It’s no particular hotel lobby, but many times I’ve walked through the Thirties from Broadway to Fifth Avenue and there are a lot of cheesy hotels there. That probably suggested it. Lonely? Yes, I guess it’s lonelier than I planned it really.”

The painting, which had formerly been in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, was sold at Sotheby’s in 1987 to Malcolm Forbes. It has a distinguished exhibition history, having been regularly exhibited, both in America and abroad, since soon after it was painted. Most recently it hung this summer in the Whitney Museum’s Edward Hopper exhibition as part of “Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75”.

Norman Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties - Though not known to have been missing, Norman Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties, one of the artist’s most beloved and recognizable images, was discovered earlier this year in a secret hiding place behind a wall in the Vermont home of noted cartoonist Don Trachte who had bought the painting from Rockwell in 1960. A replica, made by Mr. Trachte himself presumably to protect his children’s inheritance while he was in the process of divorcing his wife, has been exhibited and widely assumed to be the original since the 1970s. Depicting a father from a rural ranching community waiting with his son who is about to take a train off to college, Breaking Home Ties became known to Americans when it appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on September 25th, 1954. The painting powerfully captures the generation gap between the Depression-era rancher and his wide-eyed college-bound son in an unforgettable image expressing the social and cultural growing pains of post-World War II America. The pre-sale estimate is $4/6 million.

A second important painting by Norman Rockwell, entitled Back to Civvies, is the last Saturday Evening Post cover dedicated to the story of the American soldier recently returned from World War II. In it Rockwell has created a humorous image of a young Air Force pilot in his childhood bedroom trying on his civilian clothes only to find that he has outgrown both. His stature, now rising above the bedroom mirror, shows the pride of a young man while his smile reveals a childish amusement at his own reflection (est. $1.5/2 million).

N.C. Wyeth’s Stand and Deliver, which appeared on the cover of Life Magazine on September 22, 1921, presents a band of dark and swarthy pirates ready to charge if their demands are not met. Behind the challenging and intimidating stance of the central leader is a brigade of expressive and colorfully-clad bandits eagerly awaiting their captain’s command to attack. Images of pirates -- the popular subject matter of the ‘golden age of illustration’ -- were frequently featured in the work of Wyeth’s teacher and mentor Howard Pyle. Reflecting his continued interest in the pirate as subject matter, Wyeth created Stand and Deliver, ultimately one of his most dynamic depictions of the buccaneer (pictured below, est. $1/1.5 million).

Among the other highlights is Mary Cassatt’s Children Playing with a Cat, a composition containing the gentle warmth and familial tenderness characteristic of the artist’s most successful mother and child paintings (est. $2/3 million). Painted in 1908, the present work is from a series in which the artist depicts a mother with more than one child. The model for the child is a young girl known as Sara; the model for the mother is Renée Chauvet, a woman from a village close to Cassatt’s chateau northwest of Paris, whom the artist used in several paintings depicting maternal love during the period 1905 to 1910. Also included is Red Tulips, an elegant still-life by modernist Charles Sheeler from a series painted in the mid-1920s (est. $1.2/1.8 million). Celestial Sphere by Paul Howard Manship is the highlight of the sculpture to be offered in the November sale (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Inspired by a five-foot glass sphere etched with constellations that his friend and architect Eric Gulger acquired in Germany in the late 1920s, Manship spent several years captivated by the idea of sculpting his own celestial sphere. He endeavored to create an astronomically correct rendering of the positions of sixty six constellations. One of five casts in bronze, the present work is a remarkable feat of both craftsmanship and scientific accuracy.