Edward Hopper was an American painter, born in Nyack, New York, in 1882, who died in his New York studio in 1967. He is remembered for Nighthawks, the 1942 picture of four people in a late-night diner, and for the empty streets, hotel rooms and gas stations that followed it. Critics called him the painter of loneliness. Hopper said he was painting sunlight on the side of a house.
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Hopper himself went back and forth on that word. Asked about Nighthawks, he said he did not see it as particularly lonely, then added: "Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."
The diner is harder to pin down than it looks. Hopper said the picture was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet, and that building has since been demolished. The faces are easier to place. In a letter, Jo Hopper wrote that her husband posed for the two men in a mirror and that she posed for the girl.
Jo even wrote notes on every figure, down to the sandwich the girl is eating and a man she called the night hawk, with a beak. So the strangers at the counter were a married couple.
Hopper finished the canvas on January 21, 1942, and on May 13 the Art Institute of Chicago bought it for 3,000 dollars. A man who had once gone ten years without selling a painting now had his best-known picture in a major museum within four months.
What You'll Discover
What he did for money.
The painting he rolled up.
Who pushed him toward watercolor.
What Hitchcock borrowed from him.
What he said he was painting.
What he left to the Whitney.