That reference has led Hopper fans to engage in a search for the location of the original diner. Additionally, he noted that 'I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger'. Hopper himself said the painting 'was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet'. The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's neighborhood in Manhattan. In the event, it was Rich who went, pronounced Nighthawks 'fine as a Homer', and soon arranged its purchase for Chicago.' The sale price was $3,000 (equivalent to $49,750 in 2021). Barr spoke enthusiastically of Gas, which Hopper had painted a year earlier, and 'Jo told him he just had to go to Rehn's to see Nighthawks. Rich was in attendance, along with Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art director. Patrick's Day, Edward and Jo Hopper attended the opening of an exhibit of the paintings of Henri Rousseau at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which had been organized by Daniel Catton Rich, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon completing the canvas in the late winter of 1941–42, Hopper placed it on display at Rehn's, the gallery at which his paintings were normally placed for sale. Invoice showing $1,971 going to the artist after commission and costs He was about a month and half working on it.' Ownership history posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl. In a letter to Edward's sister Marion she wrote, 'Ed has just finished a very fine picture-a lunch counter at night with 3 figures. In January 1942, Jo confirmed her preference for the name. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street-at edge of stretch of top of window.

Sign across top of restaurant, dark-Phillies 5c cigar. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Light walls, dull yellow ocre door into kitchen right. 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. Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Jo's handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the possibility that the painting's title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the bar or that the appearance of one of the 'nighthawks' was tweaked to relate to the original meaning of the word: Jo Hopper would then add additional information about the theme of the painting.Ī review of the page on which Nighthawks is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the intended name of the work was actually Night Hawks and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942. Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine (Jo) kept a journal in which he would use a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a detailed description of specific technical details.

Josephine Hopper's notes on the painting He said 'unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city'. In response to a query on loneliness and emptiness in the painting, Hopper outlined that he 'didn't see it as particularly lonely'. It has been suggested that Hopper was inspired by a short story of Ernest Hemingway's, either ' The Killers' (1927), which Hopper greatly admired, or from the more philosophical ' A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' (1933). Nighthawks in the Art Institute of Chicago

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