Nighthawks Trivia
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49 free Nighthawks trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Nighthawks trivia quiz is built around Edward Hopper's 1942 painting of four people in a late-night diner, the most recognisable image in American art. The easy questions are ones anyone who has seen the picture can answer: the artist, the year, the museum that has owned it since the year it was painted, the cigar brand on the sign and the city whose streets it shows. The harder end is for art lovers and Hopper devotees: who posed for the figures, what the couple's own journal says the title was meant to be, the price the Art Institute of Chicago paid, the Hemingway stories that may have inspired it, the New York Times writer who tried to find the real diner, the artist who put Bogart, Monroe, Dean and Elvis in the booth, the film director who waved a reproduction at his crew, and the Tom Waits album named after it. A final stretch covers Hopper's life and other paintings, plus the 1981 Stallone thriller and the bird that share the name. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the painting, the artist and the works that quote it before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Famous Paintings, Art History and Edward Hopper-era American Art quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which everyday feature did Hopper leave out of the diner in Nighthawks?
A street entrance
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.
Q 02Nighthawks was finished weeks after which event?
Pearl Harbor
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'.
Q 03In Nighthawks, what stands in the window of the dark shop across the street from the diner?
A cash register
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.
Q 04Which museum bought Nighthawks within months of its completion?
Art Institute of Chicago
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.
Q 05About how much did a museum pay for Nighthawks in 1942?
$3,000
$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.
Q 06Which cigar brand appears on the sign above the diner in Nighthawks?
Phillies
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'.
Q 07Hopper modelled the male customers in Nighthawks on himself, posing with the help of what?
A mirror
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.
Q 08Which then-new kind of lighting gives the diner in Nighthawks its eerie glow?
Fluorescent tubes
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.
Q 09Jo Hopper's notes tag one customer in Nighthawks a 'night hawk' because of which feature?
His beak-like nose
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.
Q 10What colour is the blouse of the woman in Nighthawks?
Red
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.
Q 11Which Manhattan neighbourhood had the corner restaurant that Hopper said suggested Nighthawks?
Greenwich Village
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'.
Q 12Old photographs show which business on the lot long claimed as the Nighthawks diner's site?
A gas station
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.
Q 13Which author's short stories have been suggested as an inspiration for Nighthawks?
Ernest Hemingway
Q 21Which German director rebuilt Nighthawks as a film-within-a-film set in The End of Violence?
Wim Wenders
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.'
Q 22In which 2009 sequel does Nighthawks come to life through CGI?
Night at the Museum 2
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.
Q 23Hopper sketched even the coffee urns for Nighthawks, but what did he say he usually did with such sketches?
Burned them
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'.
Q 14Which animated series framed a diner shot after Nighthawks in its 1997 episode about Prohibition?
The Simpsons
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.
Q 15Critics say Nighthawks anticipated the look of which movie style?
Film noir
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.
Q 16In Helnwein's Nighthawks parody Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which star serves Bogart, Monroe and James Dean?
Elvis Presley
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.
Q 17Banksy's 2005 version of Nighthawks adds which figure outside the diner?
A hooligan in boxers
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.
Q 18Ridley Scott named Nighthawks as a mood source for which of his films?
Blade Runner
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'.
Q 19Which film musical set in the 1930s restaged Nighthawks as a tableau, with its stars at the counter?
Pennies from Heaven
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.
Q 20Which singer-songwriter named his 1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner after the painting?
Tom Waits
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.
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.
Q 24Hopper said that in Nighthawks he was, 'unconsciously, probably', painting the loneliness of what?
A large city
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.
Q 25Which Verdi opera did Jonathan Miller stage in 1950s New York with a Nighthawks-style bar?
Rigoletto
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.
Q 26Growing up in the yacht-building town of Nyack, New York, the painter of Nighthawks dreamed of which career?
Naval architect
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.
Q 27Under which Ashcan School painter did Hopper study life class in New York?
Robert Henri
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'.
Q 28At which 1913 exhibition did Hopper sell his first painting, Sailing, for $250?
The Armory Show
The Armory Show gave Hopper that first sale and then nothing followed: he did not sell another painting for ten years.
Q 29Which medium brought Hopper his first public recognition in the early 1920s?
Etching
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.'
Q 30Which Hopper canvas of 1925 was the first oil painting MoMA ever acquired?
House by the Railroad
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.