How to Read Paintings: Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
An irresistible depiction of city loneliness
Christopher P Jones is the author of How to Read Paintings, an introduction to some of the most fascinating artworks in art history.
By all accounts, Edward Hopper was a socially reclusive man. His wife Jo, who was gregarious by nature, recorded in her diary that “E. so seldom deigns to talk.” Another friend stated that Hopper often seemed like he “was on the verge of saying something. But he never did.”
To look at a painting like Nighthawks, made by Hopper in 1942, is to become aware of a deeper kind of quiet. There are few paintings in the history of art that place the viewer so precisely into silence as this one.
We see a diner where three customers have congregated. A row of empty stools tells us it’s late, perhaps sometime after midnight — late enough for the streets to have emptied and for the lights of nearby apartments to have been switched off. The yellow interior of the diner is like warm moonlight, pouring out invisibly through the glass and onto the street.
