“Nighthawks” is a 1942 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper. It portrays four people in a downtown diner (now demolished) in Greenwich Village 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 is Hopper’s best-known work and it is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art and it is classified as part of the American Realism movement.
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.”
