Nighthawks - Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942) shows four people inside a glowing all-night diner on a dark, empty street. Hopper finished it weeks after Pearl Harbor, as American cities went dark under wartime blackout, and later said he was probably painting "the loneliness of a large city."

The four figures

Hopper posed the scene himself, casting people close to him into a tableau of near-connection:

• The couple — a man (modeled on Hopper) and a red-haired woman (his wife, Jo), hands almost touching but not quite.
• The lone man — back turned to us, face unseen, also modeled on Hopper. The stranger the whole composition circles.
• The server — the only figure in motion, bending below the counter in bright white, the one person still doing something.
• The woman in red — looking down at something small in her hand, not at the man beside her.

The details that unsettle

Above the glass, a sign reads Phillies, five cents — cheap corner-store cigars, anchoring the dreamlike scene to something plain and priced at a nickel. Two steel coffee urns catch the light behind the counter, but the real subject is the light itself: fluorescent tubes had only just arrived in the early 1940s, and Hopper paints their cold greenish glow spilling onto the pavement.

Across the street, in the empty shop opposite, you can just make out a cash register sitting alone behind the glass — the loneliness isn't only inside the diner, it fills the whole block. Then there's the detail most people miss until it's pointed out: there is no door. Trace the glass all the way around and the diner is sealed behind one seamless wedge. We're drawn to the light and shut out of it.

Nighthawks hangs today at the Art Institute of Chicago. For more close-readings like this, see 2 Minutes Art on YouTube, or try another quiet, charged pairing in The Kiss by Auguste Rodin.