Nighthawks
Edward Hopper (1882 to 1967) · 1942
Late at night on a city corner, a diner glows like a glass tank. Inside, a man and a woman sit side by side at the counter without quite touching, a second man sits alone with his back to us, and a white capped attendant bends to his work. Outside, the street is empty and the shop windows opposite are dark. Nobody speaks. Hopper gives no door into the diner, so the viewer is left on the pavement looking in, and that sense of being shut out of the warmth is the emotional heart of the picture. He began it a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when American cities were practising blackouts.
Notice how the fluorescent light, then a novelty, spills out through the curved plate glass and falls on the pavement in a cool wedge. Hopper builds the scene from a few large shapes: the wedge of the diner, the dark facade behind, the row of windows. The green of the walls, the yellow of the interior and the red of the woman's dress are held in careful balance. Look at the two coffee urns, the only bright reflections, and at the way the man's hawk like nose gave the picture its title; Hopper's wife Jo, who posed for the woman, suggested the name.
The Art Institute bought the painting within months of its completion in 1942, and it has become the single most reproduced image of American loneliness, quoted in films, cartoons and countless parodies with different figures in the window. Hopper said he had been thinking of a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in New York, but no one has ever found the exact spot, and he admitted he had simplified and enlarged it. A memorable detail is the cash register just visible in the dark shop across the street, a small sign that daytime life is only asleep, not gone.
Did You Know? Hopper's wife Josephine kept the record of his paintings and posed for the red haired woman; she noted the picture's title as Night Hawks in her ledger.
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