Nighthawks

Description:
"Nighthawks" is an oil painting made in 1942 by the American painter Edward Hopper. The picture is considered Hopper's best-known work and is considered one of the most outstanding works of American painting.

As Hopper noted in an interview two decades after the creation of the work, he was inspired by a restaurant at a crossroads in New York's Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich Village, near which he had had his studio at Washington Square Park for decades. However, he tried to simplify and anonymize the impressions gained as much as possible in order to depict a typical American diner of the time at that time and to prevent identification of the model on Greenwich Avenue. For the design of the male persons depicted, he sat himself using a model mirror. For the woman depicted, he took his wife Josephine as a model (as with all female characters in his paintings). It was also she who proposed the title Nighthawks for the picture, which Hopper immediately accepted.