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, from a man who chose words the way he chose light. He does not deny the loneliness, but he declines to give it the painting. I think he was right. The loneliness is real, but it is the ambience of the picture, the cold where the whole scene stands in. The subject is the provision made against it, a provision of light.
The Trick Ending
He had told us, fifteen years before he painted it, what kind of picture it would have to be. In March 1927, Scribner’s Magazine printed a short story by Ernest Hemingway called “The Killers”. Hopper had illustrated for the magazine through the long years when painting did not pay, and he sat down and wrote to the editor. It was refreshing, he said, “to come upon such an honest piece of work in an American magazine”; and of “the ingenious mechanism of the trick ending”, he wrote, there was no taint in this story.
Two hired men walk into a lunch-room and wait for a boxer who never arrives. Nothing is resolved, because nothing happens: a lunch counter, at night, a man behind it, and no ending. Fifteen years later Hopper kept the architecture, subtracted the killers, and painted what was left: the light.
The Man Behind the Counter
The light is the wrong color for comfort: greenish, flat, stretching across the pavement in a long trapezoid, the sole brightness on the street. It flatters no one; it is the light of a place that must be scrubbed before dawn. No one in that diner is consoled, and no one is fooled. They are held, quietly, as hostages of loneliness.
The three customers keep their places like people with nowhere better to be, which is not quite the same as nowhere to go. They have rooms… maybe the ones behind those black windows across the street, one flight up. Whatever the rooms withhold at this hour, the counter provides.
The day after Hopper finished the painting, his wife Jo wrote to his sister: “E. posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl.” So the diner holds one man twice, and his wife once. And it holds a fourth figure, whom almost no one mentions.
Look at him for a moment. He is bent, in white, below the line of the counter, the only body in the picture caught in motion. Hopper gave him the brightest clothes on the canvas, then built the room around him: the urns at his elbow, the light he stands in so squarely that he might be its source. At four in the morning he will still be there. The coffee will still be hot. Whoever comes in out of that dark will be received. He is the only person in the painting who is there for someone else, like an anonymous hero fighting the solitude of the city and expecting nothing in return.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Hemingway had already written that man. In 1933, six years after Hopper’s letter, he published a story about a café at closing time. A deaf old man sits late over his brandy. He tried to hang himself the week before, and he survived because his niece cut him down. The young waiter wants him gone. He wants to be home in bed with his wife. But the older waiter takes his time, and when pressed gives the one reason that matters: someone may need the café. Walking home through his own insomnia, he recites the prayer with the heart taken out of it, “Our nada who art in nada”.
The nothing in that story is not the fertile emptiness I wrote about once, the hollow that lets the bell ring. That emptiness made room for something to arrive. In this one nothing arrives, and nothing grows. Everyone has met it. It is what waits in the room when sleep will not come and the walls give nothing back.
You do not cultivate this nothing. You can only build a lit room against it.
And the remedy Hemingway proposes is almost insultingly small: light, cleanliness, order, and someone willing to stay open. No cure for the nada; a counter, a clean glass, a bulb that works. That is the man in white.
The Light Left On
Hopper finished the painting on 21 January 1942, after about six weeks at the easel, which places the first marks in the first days of the previous December, and Pearl Harbour was bombed on the seventh. All that winter New York practised darkness, and Hopper painted a glass box of light burning on a street corner. He painted a picture of a light that stays on, begun in the first winter the lights were ordered off.
So the painting is not a portrait of four lonely people. It is a portrait of the hour at which someone decides to stay open. When our rooms turn against us, we do not ask to be saved; we ask for somewhere to sit while it passes.
You are standing in the middle of the road, where no one could actually stand, and the light does not quite reach you. But it is on, and someone is keeping it on. It is still open. That is all the provision anyone is making tonight, and it is enough to cross the street for.
it’s art is free: one essay every few weeks, when something is worth saying.
If you know someone who is always the last one to leave, send them this.
If this kept you company:
Wow! And your skillful writing 'keeps the light on' as well. Thank you for conveying so beautifully what we all need right now.
People are naturally drawn to the contrast between light and darkness.
There is someone keeping the light on in the middle of the night. That in itself is a deeply gentle story.
I believe that kind of comforting light is something everyone truly needs.