Nighthawks, 1942 by Edward Hopper Nighthawks, 1942 by Edward Hopper Courtesy of Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is Hopper's most famous work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. Within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000, and has remained there ever since. Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine (Jo), kept a journal in which he would, using a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a precise description of certain technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information in which the themes of the painting are, to some degree, illuminated. A review of the page on which "Nighthawks" is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the intended name of the work was actually "Night Hawks", and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942.

Jo's handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the interesting possibility that the painting's evocative title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the bar: Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 cross canvas at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right. Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street at edge of stretch of top of window. Nighthawks was probably Hopper's most ambitious essay in capturing the night-time effects of manmade light.

For one thing, the diner's plate-glass windows cause far more light to spill out onto the sidewalk and the brownstones on the far side of the street than is true in any of his other paintings. As well, this interior light comes from more than a single lightbulb, with the result that multiple shadows are cast, and some spots are brighter than others as a consequence of being lit from more than one angle. Across the street, the line of shadow caused by the upper edge of the diner window is clearly visible towards the top of the painting. These windows, and the ones below them as well, are partly lit by an unseen streetlight, which projects its own mix of light and shadow. As a final note, the bright interior light causes some of the surfaces within the diner to be reflective. This is clearest in the case of the right-hand edge of the rear window, which reflects a vertical yellow band of interior wall, but fainter reflections can also be made out, in the counter-top, of three of the diner's occupants. None of these reflections would be visible in daylight.

Hopper's biographer, Gail Levin, speculates that Hopper may have been inspired by Vincent Van Gogh 's Caf� at Night , which was showing at a gallery in New York in January 1942. The similarity in lighting and themes makes this possible; it is certainly very unlikely that Hopper would have failed to see the exhibition, and as Levin notes, the painting had twice been exhibited in the company of Hopper's own works. Beyond this, there is no evidence that Caf� at Night exercised an influence on Nighthawks. Although there is no evidence at all (other than the fact that Hopper admired the story), Levin also suggests that he may have been inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story, The Killers. MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS Nighthawks | The Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories Exhibition History Art Institute of Chicago, The Fifty-third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, Oct. 29-Dec. 10, 1942, cat. 132. Indianapolis, 1943. Art Institute of Chicago, The Fifty-fourth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, Oct.

28-Dec. 12, 1943, no. 15. New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition, Feb. 11-Mar. 26, 1950, cat. 61, plate 28; traveled to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Apr. 13-May 14, 1950, Detroit Institute of Arts, June 4-July 2, 1950. New York City, Wildenstein, Loan Exhibition of Seventy Twentieth Century American Paintings, Feb. 21-Mar. 22, 1952, cat. 54. Venice, Esposiazione Biennale Internazionale d’Arte, June 14-Oct. 19, 1952, cat. 26. Lake Forest College, Illinois. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper, Sept. 29-Nov. 29, 1964, cat. 43; traveled to Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. 18-Jan. 31, 1965.

Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, Fifty Years of Modern Art, June 14-July 31, 1966, cat. 81. New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, Sept. 23, 1980-Jan. 18, 1981, cat. 386; traveled to London, Hayward Gallery, Feb. 11-Mar. 29, 1981 (separate Catalogue, no 96, p. 47), Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Apr. 22-June 17, 1981, Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, July 10-Sept. 6, 1981, Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 3-Nov. 29, 1981, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dec.16, 1981-Feb. 14, 1982.

Essen, Germany, Museum Folkwang, Edward Hopper und die Fotografie: die Warheit des Sichtbaren (Edward Hopper and Photography: The Truth of the Real), June 28-Sept. 27, 1992, p. 63, ill. London, Tate Modern, Edward Hopper, May 27-Sept. 5, 2004; traveled to Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Oct. 9, 2004-Jan. 9, 2005. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, October 3-December 31, 2006. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Edward Hopper, May 6-August 19, 2007; traveled to Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, September 16, 2007-January 21, 2008; Art Institute of Chicago, February 16-May 11, 2008.

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Edward Hopper, June 12-September 16, 2012; traveled to Paris, Galeries nationales d'exposition du Grand Palais, October 5, 2012-January 28, 2013, Paris only. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper Drawings, May 23-October 6, 2013; travels to Dallas Museum of Art, November 17, 2013-February 16, 2014; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, March 15-June 22, 2014, New York only. Art Institute of Chicago, Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, November 10, 2013-January 27, 2014; traveled to Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, February 22-May 18, 2014, cat. 28.

Publication History Gail Levin, “Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Surrealism, and the War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22, 2 (1996), pp. 180-95, fig. 1. The Art Institute of Chicago: Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture, selected by James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein (Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), p. 85, ill. Judith A. Barter et al., "American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955," (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat. 133. Nina Baym et al., eds., "The Norton Anthology of American Literature," (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 8th edition, (ill.). Arthur Shimamura, "Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder" (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 237 (ill.).

Derek Matravers, "Introducing Philosophy of Art: In Eight Case Studies," (Routledge, 2013), (ill.). Duane Preble Emeritus et al., Prebles' Artforms (Pearson, 2013), 11th ed., p. 428. (ill.). Robert Burleigh, "Edward Hopper Paints His World," (Henry Holt and Co., 2014), (ill.). Steven Mintz, "The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood," (Belknap Press, 2015), (ill.). Ramsay H. Slugg, "Handbook of Practical Planning for Art Collectors and Their Advisors," (ABA Book Publishing, 2015), (ill.). Judith A. Barter, ed. "America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s" exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2016), fig. 3, p. 178. Ownership History The artist; consigned to Frank Rehn Galleries, 1942; sold to The Art Institute of Chicago, 1942.

Add this item to: Nighthawks by Edward Hopper – Facts & History of the Painting Complete Works Inspired by a diner in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, oil on canvas painting, is Hopper’s most famous and recognizable work in American art. The painting was completed in January, 1942, and it depicts a waiter and three other patrons, sitting in a downtown diner late at night, on a barren New York street corner. Because Hopper was born and lived in New York, this Greenwich Village diner was chosen as his subject. Nighthawks was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago shortly after completion, and remains there as a great reflection of American history. Nighthawks Description The nighttime scene, on a desolate street intersection, allows the viewer to look inside the Phillies Five-Cent Cigar diner. A time when cigars were smoked fashionably, and men wore stylish suits and hats, it is evident by their dress, that it depicts a different era of America. The diner, encased in glass, is brightly lit, and the viewer can see three men and a woman within the diner.

The detail is such, that the viewer can see details such as coffee cups, and even salt and pepper shakers; however, the painting also leaves a lot to the imagination. The triangular architecture of the diner suggests that it is located on an intersection of streets. The bright yellow and white colors used within the diner, along with the bright cherry wood of the bar counter, makes the diner look warm and inviting. It is a great contrast to the green, darker, and vacant ambiance of the street and buildings surrounding it. It is a thought-provoking painting, leading the viewer to wonder why there is nobody else around, and to wonder who the people are in the diner, and why they are there. Edward Hopper was a historian who used painting as his medium, instead of the written word, to depict 1940’s American life in his home state, through Nighthawks. Many interpretations can be made as to its symbolism and deeper meanings, yet it depicts a time in American history to be remembered. Edward Hopper Techniques Hopper used perspective in setting the scene for Nighthawks, at an angled street corner allowing him to show the subjects from various angles, while also displaying the street scene.

It gives the viewer the feeling of looking in on something. It also lets the viewer wonder what the man looks like, with his back to the viewer, creating intrigue. Hopper’s use of bright color and reflection shows realistic lighting. The top of the ceiling is the brightest spot, and depicting fluorescent lighting of the time, washes out the skin tones of the patrons very realistically. The dull colors dominate the outside scene, as brighter colors inside the diner draw the eye to what is happening inside, just as realistically as if the viewer were walking down a street at night, and the viewer’s eye would be drawn to the light source. The lighting effect captures the night time nuance of man-made light. The viewer can see light escaping from the diner windows onto the New York City streets. Multiple shadows are cast upon the street, and the light realistically reflects on objects inside the diner, which indicates night time, because these shadows would not be cast, and reflections would not be visible in daylight. Known best for his oil paintings, Hopper often made sketches before painting, detailing his intentions. He used light and shadow effectively to create the mood of his paintings, and bright sunlight, signifying revelation, and the shadows it cast in life.

He used simplified shapes and details to show realism, and he used saturated colors to emphasize contrast, and to create the mood for his realistic American scenes. His subjects were common American-life scenes, and its people. Hopper once said about his art: “The term life used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it”. Edward Hopper depicted the real-life diner in America brilliantly, and Nighthawks has become an influence in paintings, sculptures, literature, film, music, television, and parodies. For a painting that took him under two months to complete, Nighthawks will continue to be admired for a long time, making history itself. Leave a Reply Edward Hopper (1882–1967) | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Works of Art (10) Essay Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, a town located on the west side of the Hudson River, to a middle-class family that encouraged his artistic abilities.

After graduating from high school, he studied briefly at the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City (1899–1900), and then he enrolled in classes at the New York School of Art (1900–1906). In his shift from illustration to the fine arts, he studied with William Merritt Chase , a leading American Impressionist painter, and with Robert Henri, who exhorted his students to paint the everyday conditions of their own world in a realistic manner. His classmates at the school included George Bellows, Guy Pène du Bois, and Rockwell Kent. After working as an illustrator for a short time, Hopper made three trips abroad: first to Paris and various locations across Europe (1906–7), a second trip to Paris (1909), and a short visit to Paris and Spain the following year (1910). Although he had little interest in the vanguard developments of Fauvism or Cubism , he developed an enduring attachment to the work of Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet , whose compositional devices and depictions of modern urban life would influence him for years to come.

In the 1910s, Hopper struggled for recognition. He exhibited his work in a variety of group shows in New York, including the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910) and the famous Armory Show of 1913, in which he was represented by a painting titled Sailing (1911; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh ). Although he worked primarily in oil painting, he also mastered the medium of etching, which brought him more immediate success in sales ( 25.31.7 ). He began living in the Greenwich Village neighborhood, where he would continue to maintain a studio throughout his career, and he adopted a lifelong pattern of spending the summers in New England. In 1920, at the age of thirty-seven, he received his first one-person exhibition. The Whitney Studio Club, recently founded by the heiress and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, showed sixteen of his paintings. Although nothing was sold from the exhibition, it was a symbolic milestone in Hopper’s career. Just a few years later, Hopper found himself in a far more prosperous and prominent position as an artist. His second one-person exhibition, at the Frank K. M.

Rehn Gallery in New York, was such a commercial success that every painting was sold; the Rehn Gallery would represent him for the rest of his career. In 1930, his painting House by the Railroad (1925; Museum of Modern Art, New York ) was the first work to be acquired for the collections of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art. This image embodied the characteristics of Hopper’s style: clearly outlined forms in strongly defined lighting, a cropped composition with an almost “cinematic” viewpoint, and a mood of eerie stillness. Meanwhile, Hopper’s personal life had also advanced: in 1923, he married the artist Josephine Verstille Nivison, who had been a fellow student in Robert Henri’s class. Jo, as Hopper called her, would become an indispensable element of his art. She posed for nearly all of his female figures and assisted him with arranging the props and settings of his studio sessions; she also encouraged him to work more extensively in the medium of watercolor painting, and kept meticulous records of his completed works, exhibitions, and sales.

In 1933, Hopper received further critical recognition as the subject of a retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art. He was by then celebrated for his highly identifiable mature style, in which urban settings, New England landscapes, and interiors are all pervaded by a sense of silence and estrangement ( 25.31.2 ). His chosen locations are often vacant of human activity, and they frequently imply the transitory nature of contemporary life. At deserted gas stations, railroad tracks, and bridges, the idea of travel is fraught with loneliness and mystery ( 37.44 ). Other scenes are inhabited only by a single pensive figure or by a pair of figures who seem not to communicate with one another. These people are rarely represented in their own homes; instead, they pass time in the temporary shelter of movie theaters, hotel rooms, or restaurants ( 31.62 ). In Hopper’s most iconic painting, Nighthawks (1942; Art Institute of Chicago ), four customers and a waiter inhabit the brightly lit interior of a city diner at night. They appear lost in their own weariness and private concerns, their disconnection perhaps echoing the wartime anxiety felt by the nation as a whole.

The Hoppers spent nearly every summer from 1930 through the 1950s in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, particularly in the town of Truro, where they built their own house. Hopper used several nearby locations as frequent, repeated subjects in his art ( 62.95 ; 1974.356.25 ). He also began to travel farther for new imagery, to locations ranging from Vermont to Charleston, an automobile trip through the Southwest to California, and four visits to Mexico ( 45.157.2 ). Wherever he traveled, however, Hopper sought and explored his chosen themes: the tensions between individuals (particularly men and women), the conflict between tradition and progress in both rural and urban settings, and the moods evoked by various times of day. Hopper’s work was showcased in several further retrospective exhibitions throughout his later career, particularly at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; in 1952, he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Despite commercial success and the awards he received in the 1940s and 1950s, Hopper found himself losing critical favor as the school of Abstract Expressionism came to dominate the art world. Even during an era of national prosperity and cultural optimism, moreover, his art continued to suggest that the individual could still suffer a powerful sense of isolation in postwar America ( 53.183 ). He never lacked popular appeal, however, and by the time of his death in 1967, Hopper had been reclaimed as a major influence by a new generation of American realist artists. Jessica Murphy Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art June 2007 Citation Murphy, Jessica. “Edward Hopper (1882–1967).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (June 2007) Further Reading Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist. New York: W. W.

Norton, 1980. Lyons, Deborah, ed. Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997. Additional Essays by Jessica Murphy Murphy, Jessica. “ Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) .” (November 2009) Murphy, Jessica. “ Precisionism .” (June 2007) Related Nighthawks by Edward Hopper Nighthawks Edward Hopper, 1942 Nighthawks (1942), a picture of a diner at night, continues Hopper’s concern with small-time businesses that was first established in Early Sunday Morning. The background of Nighthawks, in fact, consists of a row of stores that resembles those pictured in Early Sunday Morning. This background serves the psychological function of emphasizing the coldness of the diner in Nighthawks. The customers seated around the counter do not seem to be the kind of people who would operate the businesses on the opposite side of the street.

The old-fashioned cash register seen in one of the dimly lit shops conjures up an air of familiarity and affability; it suggests a family business that has been in operation for a number of years and has been successful enough not to feel the need to modernize the store in order to keep customers. In contrast to the stores, the diner is lit with the new fluorescent lights that had only come in use in the early 1940s. Circular in form, this building is an island that beckons and repels; and the fluorescent lighting is intimidating, alienating, and dehumanizing. It creates an unreal and artificial feeling of warmth, an atmosphere that is clinical and more in tune with a laboratory than a restaurant. In conversation with Katherine Kuh, Hopper reflected that the scene for the painting “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” He said, “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” Jo’s [Hopper’s wife] entry in the ledger provides insight into the meaning of the diner and the people stationed within it: Nighthawks—night & brilliant interior of cheap restaurant....

Cherry wood counters & tops of surrounding stools, lights on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 across canvas at base of glass.... Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blous[e], brown hair eating sandwich. Man nighthawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back—at left.... Darkish old red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant shop dark—Phillies 5¢ cigar—picture of cigar. When one looks closely at the heads of the man and woman facing the viewer, their faces are amazingly hawklike. The title Nighthawks can refer to people who are night owls, but it also refers to a particular kind of nocturnal bird (genus Chordeiles), which is related to goatsuckers and whippoorwills. The relationship of the nighthawk to the whippoorwills suggests that this painting may be the urban pendant to Cape Cod Evening in which the collie responds to the song of the whippoorwill.

Whereas in the latter painting Hopper shows how nature is taking over, in the former, Nighthawks, he pictures a diner that represents a move toward a mechanized future and people who still exhibit an untamed restlessness. Both situations are regarded with a jaundiced eye: nature and technology attract and repel at the same time. The figures in Nighthawks could be characters in a Dashiell Hammett story. They are quiet and deliberate. Despite the number of writers who describe this painting as a meditation on desolation and loneliness, the couple appears to be completely attuned to each other. Their gestures complement one another’s, and their arms and shoulders form a cohesive trapezoid that bonds them together. The feeling of desolation in the painting may stem from the architecture of the diner, the lurid lights, and the mysterious presence of the third customer. In addition, the feeling of loneliness may have originally derived from the fact that Nighthawks was created the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, a time when young men were sent off to the armed services and the entire country was caught up in the war effort.

The fact of the war causes one to wonder exactly who the Nighthawks really are. They do not seem to be local businesspeople, and they are certainly not military personnel. They appear to be outsiders, a fact underscored by the architecture and lighting of the diner, which separate them from the surrounding community of buildings. The viewer of Nighthawks becomes another nighthawk, another creature who is unconnected to the reality of the war and who swarms around the brightly lit interior of the diner that both repulses and attracts and ultimately provides no possible means of entry. —from Edward Hopper, by Robert Hobbs * * * * * * * * * * Apparently, there was a period when every college dormitory in the country had on its walls a poster of Hopper’s Nighthawks; it had become an icon. It is easy to understand its appeal. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not. There is no way to enter it, no door.

The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model. From Jo’s diaries we learn that Hopper described this work as a painting of “three characters.” The man behind the counter, though imprisoned in the triangle, is in fact free. He has a job, a home, he can come and go; he can look at the customers with a half-smile. It is the customers who are the nighthawks. Nighthawks are predators—but are the men there to prey on the woman, or has she come in to prey on the men?

To my mind, the man and woman are a couple, as the position of their hands suggests, but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate; they have nothing to give each other. I see the nighthawks of the picture not so much as birds of prey, but simply as birds: great winged creatures that should be free in the sky, but instead are shut in, dazed and miserable, with their heads constantly banging against the glass of the world’s callousness. In his Last Poems, A. E. Housman (1859-1936) speaks of being “a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made.” That was what Hopper felt—and what he conveys so bitterly. —from Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces, by Wendy Beckett Nighthawks | The Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago 84.1 x 152.4 cm (33 1/8 x 60 in.) s.l.r.

Edward Hopper Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51 Although trained as an illustrator, Edward Hopper spent five years studying painting under Robert Henri, a member of the Ashcan School of painters who focused on the gritty realities of the city. The Ashcan School influenced Hopper’s style, though he tended to depict not the chaos of urban living but a sense of urban isolation. Hopper explained that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York ’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." The diner has since been destroyed, but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends any particular location. The painting reveals three customers lost in their own private thoughts. The anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Although Hopper denied that he purposely infused any of his paintings with symbols of isolation and emptiness, he acknowledged of Nighthawks that, "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." In selecting his vantage point, Hopper eliminated any reference to the diner’s entrance.

The viewer, drawn to the light shining from the interior, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass, a characteristic of Art Deco design. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing upon the simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the eerie glow flooding the dark street corner may be attributed to this innovation. The moody contrast of light against dark and the air of menace inside has been linked to film noir , a movement in American cinema that featured stories of urban crime and moral corruption. Nighthawks, 1942 - Edward Hopper - WikiArt.org Edward Hopper it is a historically significant artwork the image is only being used for informational and educational purposes the image is readily available on the internet the image is a low resolution copy of the original artwork and is unsuitable for commercial use More … WikiArt.org allows unlimited copying, distributing and displaying of the images of public domain artworks solely. We use here Copyright term based on authors' deaths according to U.S. Copyright Law, that is 70 years. In other countries, the duration of copyright term may differ.

Please check here copyright length according to your country's legislation before you consider reproducing images borrowed from Wikipaintings.org Artworks protected by copyright are supposed to be used only for contemplation. Images of that type of artworks are prohibited for copying, printing, or any kind of reproducing and communicating to public since these activities may be considered copyright infringement. Edward Hopper Dimensions: 152.4 x 84.1 cm Location: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, US Tags: houses-and-buildings Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet," but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of 20th-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner.

Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Reworked and parodied countless times, Nighthawks has become an icon of American culture. Nighthawks - Edward Hopper Nighthawks (1942) Edward Hopper Edward Hopper (1882-1967) represents arguably the zenith of 20th century American Realism. After training with Robert Henri (1869-1929) at the New York School of Art, Hopper worked primarily as a commercial illustrator for the first half of his life. In fact, although Hopper readily sold a variety of prints and watercolors on the side, he did not achieve his first artistic success until he was forty-three. At the Rehn Gallery in 1924, Hopper's solo show sold every work in the gallery; this was followed by his personal watershed painting, The House by the Railroad, in 1925.

From that point on, Edward Hopper would be defined by his use of light, isolation, and implied narrative in composition. Hopper's dramatic impact was such that Hitchcock would later use The House by the Railroad as the basis for the Bates Motel in Psycho. The painting at the right, Nighthawks, is Hopper's most famous work. On display at the Art Institute of Chicago, Nighthawks is an oil and canvas work that represents Hopper at his most iconicand most popular. This 1942 work epitomizes Hopper as a painter of loneliness and existential solitude, rendered as the contrast between the mute colors of night and the harsh fluorescent glare of the diner lights. Hopper often drew on his immediate surroundings for inspiration, most notably New York City and Cape Cod. Nighthawks is drawn, in Hopper's words from "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Though the building that inspired him no longer exists, the evocative, transcendental diner that he depicted endures. At first glance, as with many of Hopper's works, it might be easy to dismiss the subject as mundane. However, the trademark tension between light and shadow immediately draws the eyes in the composition.

In this, Hopper reflects a painter's sense of film noir, particularly in his urban subjects. Equally distinctive in Nighthawks is the distance Hopper places, both literally and figuratively, between the viewer and the four subjects framed within the diner. Although Hopper's interests lay much more in the play of light than in human subjects, the intentionally ambiguous scene created by the interactionor lack thereofbetween the characters is rich in narrative possibilities. The undercurrent of desperation that makes the work so intriguing is subtly reinforced by the artist in a number of ways. Note that the selective angle chosen for the point of view precludes the entryway; these four human beings drawn together by happenstance seem trapped within the glass walls, specimens for our imaginations. The couple in the background hunch over the cherry wood counter, their faces tired and gaunt. The woman examines her nails, seemingly oblivious to the man sitting next to her. The man in the foreground sits apart from the rest, a mystery with his back turned and partially obscured from the light. And linking them, the soda jerk who seems trapped within the confines of the counter, eyeing the customers with perhaps a hint of suspicion.

The time of night, the fluorescent glare, and the posturing all create a bleak, almost menacing solitude. Even the title, Nighthawks, carries tension with it. Hopper combines all these elements with a pervasive barrenness in the composition that haunts the viewer. Hopper never abandoned the themes that made his reputation as an artist. His art reflects the intense strains of loneliness and isolation that fueled his personal life, despite Hopper's protestations to the contrary. In Nighthawks, even Hopper admitted that "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." Although the waxing of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s would dampen the art world's enthusiasm for Hopper's style of realism in general, Edward Hopper has been posthumously recognized for his contributions precisely because of the timeless power of works such as Nighthawks. The painting still conjures compelling, if often bleak, fits of the imagination. That Diner from Edward Hopper's Iconic 'Nighthawks'? It Never Existed That Diner from Edward Hopper's Iconic 'Nighthawks'?

It Never Existed 18.23K things we actually like American painter Edward Hopper told people that the diner in his iconic painting "Nighthawks" was "suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." But which two streets? And which restaurant ? You almost definitely know "Nighthawks," either from that Art History class you barely paid attention in, or from that one episode of The Simpsons that parodied it, or that awful poster that replaces its anonymous, nocturnal subjects with, like, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and 2Pac. It's one of the most famous and easily-recognizable paintings in American history, and Jeremiah Moss, the blogger behind the great catalog of change Vanishing New York , has spent the last few months trying to pinpoint the location of the restaurant that suggested Hopper's diner.

If you've got the time, it's worth reading the several-part story he posted on the blog, complete with documentary photographs ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Coda ), but if you just want the broad strokes, Moss published an op-ed in Monday's New York Times outlining his search: Not long ago, one of the readers of my blog, Vanishing New York , sent in an old photo of the lot. There was no diner, only an Esso gas station and a White Tower burger joint that looked nothing like the moody, curved, wedge-shaped lunch counter in "Nighthawks." An urban mystery had just revealed itself: If the diner wasn't in the empty lot, then where was it? Being an obsessive type, prone to delve, I began searching for Hopper's diner with the help of two of my readers. Multiple streets converge at Mulry Square, creating a shattered-glass array of triangular corners. The buildings wedge themselves into these tight angles, bricks tapering to near points, each structure bearing a Hopperesque resemblance. I snapped photos of every possibility and checked them against their ancestral images in the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery.

I made a trip to the city's Municipal Archives, where I scanned the 1930s atlases of Manhattan known as "land books," matched block and lot numbers to scratchy rolls of microfilm and scrolled through muddy 1940s tax photos. Slowly, I began ruling out suspects. Moss eventually comes to the conclusion that the restaurant spoken of by Hopper never actually existed—certainly not on Greenwich avenue. And he's bummed: "the discovery that the 'Nighthawks' diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper's imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition, though no bricks have fallen."

Question: What is Edward Hopper's famous night-time painting of customers in an American diner?
Answer: Nighthawks