Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that shows three customers and a server in an all night diner, seen from the dark street outside. It hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it is read as the loneliest place in the city: four people under one hard light, and none of them looking at another.
Hopper finished it on 21 January 1942, weeks after the United States entered the Second World War. His wife Jo wrote that he had worked on it for about a month and a half.
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The loneliness is the part Hopper doubted. Asked about the painting in an interview, he said he did not see it as particularly lonely. Then he added that, unconsciously, he was probably painting the loneliness of a large city.
So the famous reading rests on a maybe, and Hopper left very little else in words. The people around him left more. His wife kept notes while he worked, and wrote a letter to his family the day after he finished. The diner itself, he said, he had simplified and made bigger, and no one has ever settled where it stood.
I trust those papers more than any theory of the painting. They show a man who built a scene from a mirror, a wife's notebook and a street corner he half remembered.
Who posed for the men in the diner?
Hopper did. On 22 January 1942, the day after he finished the canvas, Jo wrote to his sister Marion: "E. posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl."
So two of the figures carry the painter's own face, studied in a mirror, and the red haired woman is his wife. Jo was a painter herself.
Hopper had spent years painting the quiet rooms of American cities, and for this one Jo did more than pose for him: she described it in her notebook.
What You'll Discover
What Jo wrote in her notebook.
Where the diner really stood.
What sits on the counter.
What Chicago paid for it.