For most of art history, the people who forged iron, hauled boats or served drinks stood at the edge of the picture, behind the saints, the kings and the heroes.
These twelve paintings put them in the middle, and they run back in time, from a New York diner that Edward Hopper painted in 1942 to a forge that Diego Velázquez painted in Rome in 1630.
Between the two come a Dutch milkmaid, a line of Russian barge haulers and a Paris barmaid. Some of the pictures were turned down or attacked when first shown, and one of the most famous no longer exists.
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How These Were Chosen
A forge is lit by one thing, the iron itself, heated until it glows and struck before it cools, and painters kept coming back to the light it throws on faces and arms. Hauling, gleaning, scraping floors and breaking stone gave them something close, a body caught in the middle of an effort.
For centuries, though, the academies, the official schools that trained painters and ranked the subjects of art, placed such scenes far below gods and heroes. Each painting chosen shows real workers, or a real workplace the artist had seen, at a step of the job that can be read.
12. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942)
Edward Hopper finished Nighthawks in New York on January 21, 1942. It shows a corner diner late at night, seen from the empty street through a long curved window that wraps around the room.
Three customers sit at the counter. Behind it, a young man in a white jacket and cap bends forward, his hands busy below the counter and his eyes lifted toward a customer. He is the easiest figure to miss, and the only one working.
Hopper took the room from a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, and later said he had "simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger."
His wife, Jo Hopper, a painter herself, kept the ledger in which the couple listed and described each of his pictures. Her entry for this one singles out a "very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter," along with the light on the "metal tanks at rear right."
Those tanks stand at the back of his narrow workspace, between the counter and the wall. Hopper closed the space around it. The diner shows no door and the corner has no lit streetlamp, so the only light on the sidewalks pours out of the window, from the room where the man in white works.
At a Glance
Artist: Edward Hopper (1882 to 1967)
Painted: 1942
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 84.1 × 152.4 cm (33.1 × 60 in)
Where to see it: Art Institute of Chicago
About This Painting
Did Edward Hopper mean Nighthawks to be lonely?
Only partly, by his own account. Hopper said he did not see the scene as particularly lonely, but added that, unconsciously, he was probably painting the loneliness of a large city.
What does the sign above the Nighthawks diner say?
The sign advertises Phillies cigars, a cheap American brand sold in grocery stores and gas stations.
11. Francisco de Goya, The Forge (about 1815 to 1820)
Three blacksmiths share a single blow. In the foreground, the man nearest the viewer swings a sledgehammer up over his shoulder. Beside him, his partner bends forward to pin a glowing piece of iron to the anvil with tongs, and a stooped old man pushes in between them.
Francisco de Goya, painter to the kings of Spain, stops The Forge just before the hammer comes down. He gave three smiths a canvas taller than a man, a size usually kept for saints and altars, and no patron had asked him for it.