Hopper's interest in emotional interaction, or more often its absence, runs through many of his paintings of couples, a theme he had already explored as early as 1909 and developed further in etchings through the late 1910s and into the 1920s^[1]. Room in New York belongs to this body of work: a man reading a newspaper and a woman at a piano occupy the same lit room without any visible exchange between them, an image of proximity without connection that recurs across Hopper's career in different settings, from apartments to hotel rooms and railway cars^[1].

Through the 1920s Hopper developed the window as a recurring device: a viewer positioned outside a lit interior, often from an elevated or oblique angle, watching a private scene unfold without being part of it^[2]. The window functioned in two directions at once, separating the artist and viewer from the people inside while also cutting those figures off from the wider world beyond their own room, a tension Hopper often sharpened with details such as a fluttering curtain to contrast the enclosed, contemplative mood of the interior against a more active world outside^[1]. Elevated viewpoints of this kind, looking down into a room from a raised position, appear repeatedly in his mature work of this period, placing the spectator in something close to the position of a voyeur^[2].

Hopper married the painter Josephine Nivison in 1924, and from that point she modelled for every female figure in his subsequent work, insisting she alone should pose for him^[1]. Hopper's mature style crystallised through the 1920s partly as a result of his years working as an etcher, a practice that trained him to work from memory and from simple sketches made on location rather than directly in front of a subject, building the final composition afterwards in the studio^[1]. By the time he painted Room in New York, this studio-based method of composing a scene from memory and invention, rather than direct transcription, was his established way of working.