Hopi Indian House is a small oil painting on canvas board by Elbridge Ayer Burbank. It measures four and a half inches in height and six inches in width.
The location of this painting was noted by the artist as “Polacca, Arizona, 80 miles from Holbrook, Arizona, where the Santa Fe Railroad is.” Although the settlement of Polacca was established in the late 19th century with a day school and trading post to accommodate population growth, Elbridge Ayer Burbank’s close-up architectural view presents it as a historic, timeless Hopi village. For more about this painting style and the history of this painting, read the “About this Artwork” section above.
Burbank uses loose brushstrokes and dollops of paint in earth tone colors and yellows to convey the light, the architecture, and the people in his work. The painting depicts a multi-room, multi-level building structure, tall on the left and shorter on the right. The walls of the buildings are primarily adobe-colored, a light brown reflecting the desert earth used to cover them with mud plaster. They are dotted with scribbly and scraggly dark brown lines, along with patches and smudges of red, green, white, yellow, and orange. These may indicate cracks or blemishes in the walls, or perhaps decorations or attached fixtures. Yellow brushstrokes highlighting the edges of the buildings capture the effects of sunlight on the adobe.
The taller building on the left has a stepped outside wall leading to a second, slightly uneven level, with a dark grey outline of a doorway at the far left. The building on the right also has two levels, with one solid wall stacked slightly set back from the other. The area between the two levels forms a flat roof terrace, where two very small figures, made from minimal blue, orange, and brown dots of paint, appear to be standing.
Another figure, formed from larger orange and brown blobs, stands at the base of the structure, its dark blue shadow extending far in front of it as the sun shines from the upper left. The figure stands near a very large, long gray ladder, seemingly made from solid tree logs, leaning against the building and used to reach the roof terrace.
