Nighthawks puts you on a street corner past midnight, in a city that has finished with the day. The shops opposite have shut their lights, the upstairs windows are asleep, the pavements are empty. What remains is a diner wrapped in a single curve of glass and, inside it, held in a light with no visible source, four people: a man and a woman whose hands lie close on the counter without touching, a second man alone with his back to us, and a man in white bent to some small task between two coffee urns. No one is speaking. The glass, if you follow it round, admits no door: no way in from the street, and no way out either.
The loneliest painting in America, people have called it for more than eighty years. Hopper himself, asked twenty years after he painted it, would concede only this much: “Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
If you read the sentence slowly: two hedges in the first five words, fro…
