49 Fun Facts About Nighthawks

Which everyday feature did Hopper leave out of the diner in Nighthawks?

A street entrance is nowhere to be seen. Hopper painted no way in, so the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out behind a seamless wedge of glass.

Nighthawks was finished weeks after which event?

The attack on Pearl Harbor had New Yorkers bracing for air raids, but Hopper painted on. His wife Jo complained that he 'refused to take any interest in our very likely prospect of being bombed'.

In Nighthawks, what stands in the window of the dark shop across the street from the diner?

A cash register, an old-fashioned one, is the only thing on show in the unlit shop. Some critics read it as a sign of an older, more settled world of small family businesses.

Which museum bought Nighthawks within months of its completion?

Art Institute of Chicago director Daniel Catton Rich saw it at Hopper's dealer and soon arranged to buy it. Jo Hopper had urged the head of New York's Museum of Modern Art to go and look instead.

About how much did a museum pay for Nighthawks in 1942?

$3,000 bought what became one of the most recognisable paintings in American art. In 2018 another Hopper canvas sold at auction for almost $92 million.

Which cigar brand appears on the sign above the diner in Nighthawks?

Phillies were a cheap, popular American cigar, and the sign prices them at five cents. It marks the diner as an ordinary corner joint; Jo Hopper's own notes call it a 'cheap restaurant'.

Hopper modelled the male customers in Nighthawks on himself, posing with the help of what?

A mirror let Hopper sit for the hatted customers himself, while his wife Jo posed for the woman. From the mid-1920s she modelled nearly every female figure he painted.

Which then-new kind of lighting gives the diner in Nighthawks its eerie glow?

Fluorescent tubes had only just come into everyday use in the early 1940s. Their hard glow turns the diner into a beacon on the dark corner and makes its customers look, one critic wrote, like specimens in a jar.

Jo Hopper's notes tag one customer in Nighthawks a 'night hawk' because of which feature?

His beak-like nose seems to be the joke: her entry reads 'Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit'. A day after the canvas was done she wrote that Night Hawks 'would be a fine name for it', and it stuck.

What colour is the blouse of the woman in Nighthawks?

Red. Jo Hopper, who sat for the figure, logged her as a 'girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich', yet museum guides routinely describe the woman as a redhead.

Which Manhattan neighbourhood had the corner restaurant that Hopper said suggested Nighthawks?

Greenwich Village was Hopper's home from 1913 until his death. He said a restaurant there suggested the picture, but that he 'simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger'.

Old photographs show which business on the lot long claimed as the Nighthawks diner's site?

A gas station stood on the lot from the 1930s into the 1970s. The blogger who dug out the photographs in 2010 concluded that Hopper's diner was probably never one real place at all.

Which author's short stories have been suggested as an inspiration for Nighthawks?

Ernest Hemingway's 'The Killers' has two hitmen waiting in a small-town lunchroom. When it ran in Scribner's Magazine in 1927, Hopper wrote to the editor to praise 'such an honest piece of work'.

Which animated series framed a diner shot after Nighthawks in its 1997 episode about Prohibition?

The Simpsons borrowed the shot for an episode in which Springfield bans alcohol. One art historian suggests it is parodied so often because its empty, timeless staging lets anyone project a story onto it.

Critics say Nighthawks anticipated the look of which movie style?

Film noir took hold in Hollywood in the 1940s, just as the painting appeared. The debt may run both ways: Hopper was an avid moviegoer whose canvases are often likened to film stills.

In Helnwein's Nighthawks parody Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which star serves Bogart, Monroe and James Dean?

Elvis Presley takes the counterman's place. Gottfried Helnwein tied the diner's bleak mood to 'the tragic fate of the decade's best-loved celebrities', and his 1984 version became a popular poster.

Banksy's 2005 version of Nighthawks adds which figure outside the diner?

A hooligan in boxers, Union Jack ones, has just smashed the diner window with a chair. Banksy showed the canvas in 2005 at Crude Oils, a London exhibition where live rats ran loose in the gallery.

Ridley Scott named Nighthawks as a mood source for which of his films?

Blade Runner: Scott said he was 'constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the look and mood I was after'.

Which film musical set in the 1930s restaged Nighthawks as a tableau, with its stars at the counter?

Pennies from Heaven froze its leads inside the diner even though its story unfolds years before Hopper painted it. The 1981 film also restaged his cinema scene New York Movie.

Which singer-songwriter named his 1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner after the painting?

Tom Waits recorded it over two July nights in a Los Angeles studio rigged up as a jazz club, with tables, chairs and an invited audience, to catch a live after-hours mood.

Which German director rebuilt Nighthawks as a film-within-a-film set in The End of Violence?

Wim Wenders, a Hopper fan, was once asked why the painter appeals to so many filmmakers. His answer: 'You can always tell where the camera is.'

In which 2009 sequel does Nighthawks come to life through CGI?

Night at the Museum 2 sets the diner's customers moving on a gallery wall in Washington. A curator who reviewed it pointed out the licence: the canvas has never belonged to the Smithsonian.

Hopper sketched even the coffee urns for Nighthawks, but what did he say he usually did with such sketches?

Burned them: 'just a few lines on yellow typewriter paper, and then I almost always burn them,' he said. His studies for Nighthawks escaped the fire and were shown in a New York exhibition of his drawings in 2013.

Hopper said that in Nighthawks he was, 'unconsciously, probably', painting the loneliness of what?

A large city, he said, though he added that he 'didn't see it as particularly lonely'. He also said the picture had more to do with the possibility of predators in the night.

Which Verdi opera did Jonathan Miller stage in 1950s New York with a Nighthawks-style bar?

Rigoletto became a Mafia story in Miller's 1982 English National Opera staging. The Duke is a slick young mob boss, and his big aria, 'La donna e mobile', starts up on a jukebox.

Growing up in the yacht-building town of Nyack, New York, the painter of Nighthawks dreamed of which career?

Naval architect: as a boy he carved model sailboats and barges. He chose art instead, but his parents insisted on commercial illustration, work he came to detest.

Under which Ashcan School painter did Hopper study life class in New York?

Robert Henri told his students to 'forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life'. Hopper, who went on to paint diners and movie theatres, called him 'the most influential teacher I ever had'.

At which 1913 exhibition did Hopper sell his first painting, Sailing, for $250?

The Armory Show gave Hopper that first sale and then nothing followed: he did not sell another painting for ten years.

Which medium brought Hopper his first public recognition in the early 1920s?

Etching won Hopper two prizes in 1923, and he felt it changed everything that came later: 'After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystallize.'

Which Hopper canvas of 1925 was the first oil painting MoMA ever acquired?

House by the Railroad arrived in January 1930 as a gift from Stephen Clark, heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. Within four years the museum had given Hopper a retrospective, rare for a living American.

Which Hopper street scene was first titled Seventh Avenue Shops?

Early Sunday Morning got its Sunday from someone else. Hopper called the row of shops 'almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue' but said the day 'wasn't necessarily Sunday': that word 'was tacked on later'.

Which Hopper painting sold for almost $92 million at auction in 2018?

Chop Suey belonged to collector Barney Ebsworth, who had promised it to the Seattle Art Museum. After his death in 2018 his estate sent it to auction instead.

Where did the Hoppers spend their summers from 1930 on?

South Truro on Cape Cod drew them back nearly every summer for the rest of their lives. In 1933 Jo came into an inheritance, and the couple spent it on building their own house there.

Which institution received Jo Hopper's bequest of more than 3,000 works?

The Whitney had backed Hopper since 1920, when its forerunner, the Whitney Studio Club, gave him his first one-man show. Jo left it the couple's whole artistic estate when she died, ten months after him.

Which Iowa museum owns Hopper's 1927 painting Automat?

Des Moines Art Center's canvas shows a smartly dressed woman alone with her coffee, a modern sight in 1927: one Hopper scholar notes that automats were then being promoted as proper places for a working woman to dine alone.

Which pop star named her 1993 world tour after Hopper's burlesque painting Girlie Show?

Madonna took the title from his 1941 canvas of a striding burlesque queen. The model was his wife Jo, who noted in her diary that she posed 'without a stitch on in front of the stove'.

Hopper's last painting, Two Comedians, shows two pantomime actors doing what?

Taking a bow: Jo confirmed that the pair stood for herself and Edward, making their last exit together. He died in his New York studio in 1967, aged 84, and she outlived him by ten months.

Which Hitchcock film's house is said to have been modelled on a Hopper painting of a lone Victorian mansion?

Psycho gave the Bates family a house that is reported to come from the canvas, and it was not the last borrowing: the same picture is cited as a model for the farmhouse in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven.

Which star made his American film debut in the 1981 thriller Nighthawks?

Rutger Hauer plays the terrorist Wulfgar, hunted across New York by Sylvester Stallone's detective. Offered two Hollywood films at once, he chose this one because, he said, the Stallone movie was 'more interesting'.

Which sound earns the common nighthawk its old nickname, the bull-bat?

A boom from its wings, made as air rushes through the feathers at the bottom of a courtship dive, struck listeners as bull-like. Despite the name the bird is no hawk either, but a nightjar.

Which 1611 book gives the first recorded use of the word nighthawk?

The King James Bible lists 'the night hawk' in Leviticus among the birds that must not be eaten. The name then meant Europe's nightjar, and settlers later passed it on to an American cousin.

Looking back on his early trips to Paris, Hopper said he didn't remember hearing of which artist 'at all'?

Pablo Picasso was remaking painting in the same city, yet Hopper recalled: 'I'd heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don't remember having heard of Picasso at all.' He stayed a realist for life.

The museum director who bought Nighthawks called it as fine as a work by which American painter?

Winslow Homer was the yardstick for Daniel Catton Rich, who was in New York for a Rousseau show he had organised. At its opening Jo Hopper talked up her husband's new canvas, and Rich went to look.

Which Rembrandt painting did the young Hopper call 'the most wonderful thing of his I have seen'?

The Night Watch, he said, was 'past belief in its reality'. Later the painter of America's best-known night scene counted Rembrandt among the very few Europeans who had shaped him.

In That '70s Show, which couple turn out to be sitting at the Nighthawks counter?

Red and Kitty Forman retreat to their usual diner after a fancy dinner goes wrong. Kitty remarks that the scene seems familiar, and the camera pulls back to show the pair inside the painting.

In the final season of Shameless, which Gallagher steals Nighthawks from a museum?

Frank Gallagher pulls it off as one last heist while his memory is failing. His children wake up to a stolen masterpiece, and Lip has to keep it hidden while he fixes up the house to sell.

Which American novelist gave the diner's figures inner monologues in her poem 'Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942'?

Joyce Carol Oates is one of several poets who have tried to supply what Hopper left out. The painting gives its four figures no story, which is why writers keep inventing one for them.

Whose 1980 parody Nighthawks Revisited clutters the street with pedestrians and cats?

Red Grooms undid everything Hopper had tidied away. The original street has no litter and no passers-by at all, while his is jammed with both, and a cat is raiding the trash cans.

In Jo Hopper's notes on Nighthawks, what is the man sitting beside the woman holding?

A cigarette. His hand rests on the counter right beside the woman's, and critics point out the near miss: the two hands almost touch, but they don't.