If I ever get to Chica­go, one of the first things on my list will be to see the icon­ic mas­ter­piece of Amer­i­can art that is Edward Hopper’s oil on can­vas, Nighthawks, housed at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go. It has been there ever since the Insti­tute bought the piece from the artist, for the sum of $3000, just a few months after its com­ple­tion in 1942.

The pic­ture shows a late-night, sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed down­town din­er, some­where in New York. Many peo­ple have spec­u­lat­ed and tried to work out where the din­er actu­al­ly was but it is far more like­ly to be a com­pos­ite of var­i­ous joints from around the artist’s home patch of Green­wich Vil­lage, Man­hat­tan, cob­bled togeth­er in Hopper’s imag­i­na­tion.

Hop­per and his wife Jo kept metic­u­lous notes about his work, and they pro­vide a rare glimpse into this oft-uncon­sid­ered aspect of the artist’s life: the plan­ning and thought behind a planned work. This excerpt, in Jo’s hand­writ­ing, describes Nighthawks:

“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 across 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. 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. Light side walk out­side pale green­ish. Dark­ish red brick hous­es oppo­site. Sign across top of restau­rant, dark–Phillies 5c cig­ar. Pic­ture 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 pic­ture was clear­ly not thrown togeth­er, and indeed for all this atten­tion to detail, the fin­ished art­work adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It exudes a sense of lone­li­ness, of sep­a­ra­tion, of eery silence and thus dis­qui­et. Who are these peo­ple? What sto­ries of qui­et des­per­a­tion (since we some­how sus­pect that the pro­tag­o­nists are not of a hap­py and sta­ble dis­po­si­tion) have brought them to this late-night ren­dezvous? Nighthawks allows the viewer’s imag­i­na­tion to fill in the blanks.