Try to walk into the painting. You’re on the corner across the street, and the diner is right there, a long wedge of glass lit up like the only thing awake in the city, three customers at the counter and a man in white behind it. Follow the glass from the rounded corner all the way to the edge of the canvas, and look for the door.
There isn’t one. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) shows you everything inside that room and gives you no way into it. That is most of why it feels lonely: three people sit inside under all that light, and you stand on the dark corner with nothing but glass between you.
Where is the door in Nighthawks?
Hopper put the diner on a corner where two streets close in on each other, so the building is a wedge with its point toward you, and the glass bends around that point in one smooth curve. It runs from a line of green tile up to the sign until the canvas runs out, and around the corner it keeps going along the side.
The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the painting, says it in its own description: “there is no entrance to the establishment.” Its printed guide to the collection goes further: “Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass.”
There is one door in the diner, and Jo Hopper wrote it down. She kept the ledger of her husband’s paintings, and her entry for this one notes “light walls, dull yellow ocre door into kitchen right.” It’s in the back wall past the two coffee urns, behind the counterman, and it goes to the kitchen. For the customers there’s no door anywhere you can see, and the right edge of the canvas cuts the window off mid-pane, so whatever is past it Hopper never painted.
You don’t need Hopper’s word for any of this, it’s on the canvas. You can see the whole room from the street and nothing in the picture lets you into it.
The light in Nighthawks
Now look for the lamp. You won’t find that either. The light fills the room and never shows you where it comes from. Jo’s ledger catches the one clue, a “bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street,” a strip of lit ceiling just above the top of the window.
The rest of her entry reads the colors like a painter’s checklist: the “cherry wood counter,” a “brilliant streak of jade green tiles” where the glass meets the base, the “light side walk outside pale greenish,” and “outside of shop dark, green.”
That light was new, too. General Electric put fluorescent lamps on public sale on April 21, 1938, and the Art Institute’s guide puts the painting right there: “Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner.” Hopper never shows you the tube. He paints the glow, white inside and going green where it hits the street.
Who are the people in Nighthawks?
Hopper started the painting in December 1941, the month Pearl Harbor was bombed, and finished it on January 21, 1942. The next day Jo wrote to his sister Marion that he had “just finished a very fine picture” of “a lunch counter at night with 3 figures,” and then: “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.”
So the woman in red is Jo, and Hopper painted two of the men off his own reflection. Her ledger entry goes seat by seat, and it’s blunt. It gives the name to one man in particular, the one in the hat: “Man night hawk (beak).” He has the nose for it, and the title ended up covering all of them.
Look at how they sit. The man and the woman are side by side, close enough that their hands almost meet on the counter, and neither one looks at the other. The man at the left has his back to you. The counterman is bent over his work below the counter, looking up toward the couple. Four people in one bright room, and the picture never lets any of them connect.
The other all-night room
Fifty-four years before Nighthawks, in Arles, Vincent van Gogh painted the café where he rented a room. He told his brother Theo what it was: “a ‘café de nuit’ (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night. ‘Night prowlers’ can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in.” He sat up three nights running to paint it.
There’s a man in white in that room too, the landlord, standing by the billiard table, and Van Gogh describes his clothes going green under the lamps: “The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.” Hopper’s nighthawks and Van Gogh’s night prowlers are the same people, the ones with nowhere else to be at that hour.
The difference is where the painter puts you. Van Gogh hangs four lamps in plain sight, paints a half-curtained doorway at the back of the room, and stands you inside with the drinkers. Hopper hides the lamp, leaves the glass without a door, and keeps you on the sidewalk.
Where was the Nighthawks diner?
Hopper gave one clue. He said the painting “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” He lived and worked on Washington Square, a short walk away, and Greenwich Avenue cuts across the Village on a diagonal, so it makes a lot of wedge-shaped corners where it crosses the grid.
Gail Levin, who wrote Hopper’s biography, placed it at Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue and wrote that the diner “was surely on the empty triangular lot” there, the triangle called Mulry Square. Tour guides took it from there. Then in 2010 Jeremiah Moss, of the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, went through the old photographs and city tax photos of the wedge corners around it, and the story fell apart.
- Greenwich Ave at 7th Ave SouthMulry Square lotThe lot the tour guides point to.A Kesbec Esso gas station in photos from 1933 to 1940.
- 11th St and Greenwich AveThe pointed cornerA sharp wedge, glassed at the point.A corner store in the 1930s: “soda, cigars, fruit.” Flat at the point.
- 12th St and Greenwich AveBehind the Loew’s SheridanA one-story triangle, a luncheonette.Flat front, double doors, no curved glass.
- Two Boots Pizza in 2010Hanscom Bake ShopA glassy curve on the corner.Rounded chrome in the tax photo, and a bakery.
- Fantasy World in 2010The yellow-brick cornerMore prow-like than the bakery.A liquor store in the 1939–41 tax photos.
- Waverly Pl and 7th Ave SouthWaverly and SeventhAnother wedge.A grocery store.
- 173 7th Ave South, 1942Perry and Seventh“DINER” in a 1950s Land Book.A one-story building, completed February 26, 1942. No photo of it.
The Mulry Square lot held a Kesbec Esso gas station in photos from 1933 to 1940. The other corners turned out to be a corner store, a luncheonette with a flat front and double doors, a bakery with rounded chrome, a liquor store and a grocery. The only diner in the records is the word “DINER” in a 1950s Land Book, at Perry Street and Seventh Avenue South, on a one-story building completed February 26, 1942, five weeks after Hopper finished. Moss found no photo of it.
Moss ended with this: “But the ultimate truth remains bitterly out of reach.” Hopper had already said what he did with whatever he saw: “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger.”
What Hopper said about Nighthawks
The words of Hopper’s that everyone quotes come from one interview, with Katharine Kuh, who had been the Art Institute’s first curator of modern painting and sculpture, published in 1962 in her book The Artist’s Voice.
“Nighthawks seems to be the way I think of a night street.”
Lonely and empty?
“I didn’t see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Edward Hopper to Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 1962
He says no first, he didn’t see it as particularly lonely, and two sentences later he gives the line everyone quotes, with “unconsciously” and “probably” in front of it. He is looking at his own picture and admitting it knows something he didn’t plan. The Art Institute, which notes that Hopper mostly avoided commenting on his intent for the work, opens its description with that line.
By then the museum had owned the picture for twenty years. Its director, Daniel Catton Rich, saw it at the Rehn Gallery that spring and called it “fine as a [Winslow] Homer,” and the Art Institute bought it on May 13, 1942, for $3,000.
Nighthawks in the movies
When Wim Wenders was asked why Hopper appeals to so many filmmakers, he said, “You can always tell where the camera is.” In Nighthawks you can, it’s on the far corner, outside the glass, and that’s exactly where the missing door leaves you. Filmmakers keep rebuilding that view.
Dario Argento built the Blue Bar for Deep Red in 1975 as a set, modeled on Hopper’s diner. Pennies from Heaven rebuilt the painting as a set in 1981. Ridley Scott said he “was constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the look and mood I was after in Blade Runner.” Wenders rebuilt it himself as a film set inside The End of Violence in 1997, and the next year Roger Ebert saw it in the store windows of Dark City.
What all of them borrow is the view through the glass, a lit room at night with you on the outside of it.
Why Nighthawks feels lonely
Being alone and being lonely are different things. You can be alone and feel fine. Loneliness is reaching for someone and getting nothing back, and it survives company, which is why a room with four people in it can still be a picture of loneliness. Hopper puts both behind the glass. The man with his back to you is alone, and the couple sit close enough to touch and look anywhere but at each other. The reaching is left to you, out on the corner, drawn to the light of a room Hopper built with no way in.
So Sick of Feeling shows the reaching from the other side of the glass. A woman stands waist-deep in water with her hand over her face while orange fire closes in on every side, and the four lines under it end “I try to scream but no one hears / I try to flee but no one sees.” Hopper keeps you outside the glass looking in; this picture puts you in front of someone nobody answers.
Questions about Nighthawks
Is there a door in Nighthawks?
Not for the customers. The glass runs unbroken along the front, around the curved corner and down the side, and the right edge of the canvas cuts the window off. The only door in the diner is in the back wall, which Jo Hopper’s ledger lists as a “dull yellow ocre door into kitchen right.” The Art Institute of Chicago’s own description says “there is no entrance to the establishment.”
What did Edward Hopper say about Nighthawks?
Very little. Asked by Katharine Kuh in The Artist’s Voice (1962) if it was lonely and empty, he said: “I didn’t see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Was the Nighthawks diner a real place?
Only in part. Hopper said a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue suggested it and that he made it bigger. The lot usually named, Mulry Square, held a gas station from 1933 to 1940, and none of the nearby corners shows a curved-glass diner, so the building in the painting is best read as Hopper’s own.
Who posed for Nighthawks, and who named it?
Hopper and his wife Jo. In a letter of January 22, 1942, Jo wrote: “E. posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl.” The title was her idea too: “Night Hawks would be a fine name for it.”
Where is Nighthawks?
At the Art Institute of Chicago, which bought it in May 1942. It is oil on canvas, 84.1 × 152.4 cm, in the Friends of American Art Collection, number 1942.51.
Read next
- Color in film, how cinema turns light into feeling.
- Chiaroscuro in film, on light that hides its source and the dark it leaves behind.
- The colours of Paris, Texas, red, green and the one-way mirror.
References
- Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51: artic.edu
- Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (Harper & Row, 1962), p. 134.
- Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997), p. 63, for Jo Hopper’s ledger entry and the sale record.
- Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (1995; Rizzoli, 2007), pp. 349–352, for Jo Hopper’s letter of January 22, 1942 and Daniel Catton Rich.
- The Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide (Art Institute of Chicago, 1993), pp. 270–71.
- Avis Berman, “Hopper,” Smithsonian, July 2007, for Wim Wenders: web.archive.org
- Jeremiah Moss, “Finding Nighthawks,” parts 1–3 and coda, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, June 2010: part 1, part 2, part 3, coda; and “Nighthawks State of Mind,” The New York Times, July 5, 2010.
- Rick DeLair, “Fluorescent Lamp Development,” Edison Tech Center: edisontechcenter.org
- Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Arles, August 6 and September 8, 1888, translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger: 518, 533
- Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (HarperPrism, 1996; revised edition, 2017).
- Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 9–12, on The End of Violence.
- Erika Doss, “Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir,” Post Script 2, no. 2 (1983), pp. 14–36, on Pennies from Heaven.
- “Il bar di Hopper, nei disegni,” Il Post, September 24, 2013, on the Blue Bar in Deep Red: ilpost.it
- Roger Ebert, review of Dark City, 1998: web.archive.org