About Nighthawks Purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000 in 1942, Nighthawks is Edward Hopper’s best-known work. It is also one of the most recognizable paintings in American Art.
The painting portrays people in a downtown diner late at night as viewed through the diner’s large glass window. The streetscape appears darkened and deserted.
The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper himself said the painting "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet". Additionally, he noted that "I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger".
American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper was widely known for his oil paintings. He was also proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. His career benefited decisively from his marriage to fellow-artist Josephine Nivison, who contributed much to his work, both as a life-model and as a creative partner.
Hopper was thirty-one, when he sold his first painting “Sailing” in 1913 for $250. Although he hoped his first sale would lead to others in short order, his career would not catch on for many more years. At an impasse over his oil paintings, in 1915 Hopper turned to etching. By 1923 he had produced most of his approximately 70 works in this medium, many of urban scenes of both Paris and New York.
His realistic depictions of everyday urban scenes often shocked the viewer into recognition of the strangeness of familiar surroundings. He strongly influenced the Pop art and New Realist painters of the 1960s and 1970s. Hopper was considered as a minor-key artist, creating subdued drama out of commonplace subjects ‘layered with a poetic meaning’, inviting narrative interpretations, often unintended. He was praised for ‘complete verity’ in the America he portrayed.
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