5 Cliches About nighthawks painting You Should Avoid

1. Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is Hopper's most famous work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. It was completed within months and sold to Chicago's Art Institute for $3,000; it has remained there since. Edward Hopper, Josephine (Jo) and Josephine kept a journal shortly after their wedding in 1924. In it, he would sketch each nighthawks painting of his paintings using a pencil. He also included a description of technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information in which the themes of the painting are, to some degree, illuminated. 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 on the painting provide a lot more information, including the possibility that Jo's title was inspired by the beak-shaped nose the man at the bar. 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 cross 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. Red blouse, brown hair. Girl eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Dark sinister figure at left. Sidewalk outside is light and pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign at the top of the restaurant: dark Phillies 5c cigar. Photo 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. The four night owls, who are anonymous and not communicative, seem just as distant from each other as they do from one another. Jo, the artist's wife, actually modelled the red-haired woman. Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." Nighthawks Sketch, 1942 by Edward Hopper

2. Nighthawks Sketch NighthawksThis was Hopper's most ambitious essay to capture the night-time effects manmade light. One reason is that the diner's plates-glass windows allow for more light to spill onto the sidewalk and brownstones at the other end of the street than any of Hopper's other paintings. As well, this interior light comes from more than a single lightbulb, with the result that multiple shadows are cast, and some spots are brighter than others as a consequence of being lit from more than one angle. The shadow line from the upper edge the diner windows cast across the street is visible towards the top. These windows, and the ones below them as well, are partly lit by an unseen streetlight, which projects its own mix of light and shadow. As a final note, the bright interior light causes some of the surfaces within the diner to be reflective. This is most evident at the right-hand side of the rear windows, which reflect a vertical yellow strip of interior wall. However, three diner occupants can see fainter reflections in the counter-top. These reflections are not visible in daylight. Gail Levin (Hopper's biographer), speculates that Hopper might have been inspired byCafé Terrace at Night byVincent van Gogh, which was showing at a gallery in New York in January 1942. The similarity in lighting and themes makes this possible; it is certainly very unlikely that Hopper would have failed to see the exhibition, and as Levin notes, the painting had twice been exhibited in the company of Hopper's own works. Beyond this, there is no evidence thatCafe Terrace at Night exercised an influence on Nighthawks. Although there is no evidence at all (other than the fact that Hopper admired the story), Levin also suggests that he may have been inspired byErnest Hemingway's 1927 short story,The Killers.