Nighthawks

On this day in 1882, one of my favorite painters, Edward Hopper, was born. Nighthawks has been described as Hopper's best-known work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. Hopper himself 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, universal quality that transcends its particular locale.

The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife (Jo). Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Now listen to Edward Hopper talking about his creative process here!