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Nighthawks is a 1942 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper that portrays four people in a downtown diner late at night, as viewed through the diner's large glass window. The light coming from the diner illuminates a darkened and deserted urban streetscape.

The painting has been described as Hopper's best-known work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. Classified as part of the American Realism movement, within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000 (equivalent to $59,110 in 2025).

About the painting

It has been suggested that Hopper was inspired by a short story of Ernest Hemingway's, either "The Killers" (1927), which Hopper greatly admired, or the more philosophical "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933). In response to a query on loneliness and emptiness in the painting, Hopper said that he "didn't see it as particularly lonely". He said: "Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."

Josephine Hopper's notes on the painting

Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine (Jo) kept a journal in which he would use a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a detailed description of specific technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information about the theme of the painting.

A review of the page on which Nighthawks is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the intended name of the work was actually Night Hawks and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942.

Jo's handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the possibility that the painting's title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the counter or that the appearance of one of the "nighthawks" was tweaked to relate to the original meaning of the word:

Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3⁄4 across canvas—at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right.

Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back—at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark—Phillies 5¢ cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street—at edge of stretch of top of window.

In January 1942, Jo confirmed her preference for the name. In a letter to Edward's sister, Marion, she wrote, "Ed has just finished a very fine picture—a lunch counter at night with 3 figures. Night Hawks would be a fine name for it. E. posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl. He was about a month and half working on it."

Ownership history

Upon completing the canvas in the late winter of 1941–42, Hopper placed it on display at Rehn's, the gallery at which his paintings were normally placed for sale. It remained there for about a month. On St. Patrick's Day, Edward and Jo Hopper attended the opening of an exhibit of the paintings of Henri Rousseau at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which had been organized by Daniel Catton Rich, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rich was in attendance, along with Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art director. Barr spoke enthusiastically of Gas, which Hopper had painted a year earlier, and "Jo told him he just had to go to Rehn's to see Nighthawks. In the event, it was Rich who went, pronounced Nighthawks 'fine as a [Winslow] Homer', and soon arranged its purchase for Chicago." It was sold on May 13, 1942, for $3,000 (equivalent to $59,110 in 2025).

Location of the restaurant

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."

节选，摘自英文维基百科「Nighthawks (Hopper)」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用。