Who painted: 'Nighthawks' a 1942 picture where people are depicted in a diner?

American realist painter, Edward Hopper, who was born in Nyack, New York, a town located on the west side of the Hudson River, said that 'Nighthawks' (1942) was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” It is a location that is said to have a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated.

Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner here emits an eerie glow. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass.

The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls (people) appear to be as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this in his painting as a symbol of human isolation and urban emptiness. Hopper only acknowledged that in 'Nighthawks' he was painting unconsciously (probably) "the loneliness of a large city.”