In 1942, Edward Hopper painted his most well-known work. In the week of the painter’s birthday, MutualArt gets up close to Nighthawks.


Ever the evasive and guarded personality, Edward Hopper would often stringently deny the popular readings of his paintings. He did not, he would insist, intentionally imbue his urban scenes with that unspoken pregnancy of human feeling, that eerie, uncommunicative atmosphere of the modern metropolis, with which they’ve become associated. But when reflecting on his most successful and evocative painting, even Hopper himself had to admit it: “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Nighthawks was completed in January of 1942, just weeks after the United States had joined the Second World War. One might guess that a downtown diner would be alive with news, debate, and speculation at such a historic time. Hopper instead chooses to observe an oppressive silence, picking out the figures and their features in a way which suggests great, silent distances between them, despite sharing the same bubble of space and time.

The architecture of the painting seems designed to compartmentalize, divide, separate. It’s all sharp verticals and pronounced horizontals, frames and doorways, shadows and blockages. The detailed rendering of the empty shop across the street is a careful and potent observation of utter absence. The painting’s strange silence is given force by the composition of the four people who occupy it.
In her notes on the painting, Hopper’s wife, Jo, describes them as such: “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.”

At the direct centre of the large canvas sits the ‘dark sinister’ figure, his back turned to us, unwilling or unable to communicate. Our eyes catch him first, but receive nothing in return. So we scan and look elsewhere.
The activity of the man inside the counter gives us a kind of hope. He’s the most dynamic of the group by far. In the act of straightening up, he shows his face and searches for some response from the man and woman at the counter. He plays the choric role, mirroring our desire for communication. The two stony figures do not reciprocate. He might as well be talking to the two inanimate dispensing tanks behind him, which they resemble.

The relationship between the man and woman sitting at the counter is perhaps one of the most intriguing and uncatchable relationships between any two figures in any painting throughout art history. The woman morosely raises some morsel of food to her mouth, seeming mechanical, without appetite. The man allows his cigarette to smoke itself out, his blank eyes shadowed by the peak of his hat.

There’s maybe a subtle hope of tenderness, though, if you look closely at the composition of their arms and hands. The man’s right arm and the woman’s left form the exact mirror-angle of one another. Each forearm stretches along a perfect perpendicular. The angle of the woman’s other arm matches the man’s right arm exactly. This is a geometric harmony which cannot be ignored. It is part of the painting’s quiet language.
And though the woman’s hand seems to be placed behind the man’s, on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, their skin-tones overlap. As far as the application of paint goes, Hopper has essentially allowed their hands to meet. The longer you look, the more the fingers of each hand appear to shiver with tenderness, desire, apology. Perhaps these boundaries can be crossed. After all, by some miracle, we as viewers have been allowed to see and read these people through the window, and through the second window which is the surface of the painting.
Even the man with his back turned can’t help but give a little of himself away in the downward tilt of his hat, the just-visible emptiness of his glass, the way he seems to shift into the light which catches his right shoulder.
From Jo’s notes, we learn that the painting’s title is a playful joke about the strong, beaklike nose of the smoking man. This nickname is itself a glimmer of human tenderness, a light mockery which suddenly brings the whole thing to life. Here he is, our little night hawk. And here they are, this group, silent, in a time of global war, in the large, lonely city, in a diner, and, like all of us, here they are, alone/together.