Nighthawks is famous because Edward Hopper made an all-night diner look like the loneliest place in the city: a lit window, four people, a dark and empty street. The scene is so simple that almost anyone can redraw it, and for more than eighty years artists, filmmakers and musicians have done exactly that.
Hopper finished the painting on January 21, 1942, and the Art Institute of Chicago bought it that May for $3,000.
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The loneliness is the part Hopper doubted. He told the art writer Katherine Kuh, "I didn't see it as particularly lonely," and granted only that "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." In a later interview he questioned the whole reading: "I think those are the words of critics... It may be true, it may not be true."
I believe him. A painter set on loneliness would hardly have lit the one room on the block and filled it with people. The mood is real, but a good part of it came from the people looking.
What do most people miss in Nighthawks?
Four details hide in plain sight, and the first is the sign across the top of the diner. It advertises Phillies, a cheap American cigar. Jo Hopper's notes on the painting, published by the Hopper scholar Deborah Lyons, list a "sign across top of restaurant, dark" and a "Phillies 5¢ cigar." The price says how modest the room is, and the unlit sign leaves all the light to the counter.
The coffee urns came from real life. According to Gail Levin, Hopper's biographer, who cites Jo's diary, Hopper went to the Dixie Kitchen, a cheap coffeeshop where he and Jo often picked up a meal, to study them. Jo's notes mention "light on metal tanks at rear right."
Levin also traced the pose of the man behind the counter to a magazine. C. Leroy Baldridge's illustration for Ernest Hemingway's story "The Killers," which Hopper had read in Scribner's in March 1927, shows a counterman standing beside an urn, nearly a mirror image of Hopper's server.
Jo described the woman in red as a "Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich." On the canvas her hair is red. The Art Institute says the customers "appear to be lost in thought and disengaged from one another," yet the couple's hands lie almost touching on the counter.
The last detail is green. Jo's notes record a "brilliant streak of jade green tiles." Hopper signed in green too, but not at the edge of the canvas. His name, "EDWARD HOPPER," sits at the bottom right, painted on the wall of the building. For all that detail, Hopper left out something every diner needs.
What You'll Discover
Where the door went.
Where the diner really stood.
Who sat for the faces at the counter.
What the war has to do with it.
Why artists keep copying it.