Art by Edward Hopper

Hopper's 1942 painting Nighthawks, three late-night customers and a counterman lit up inside an all-night diner on an otherwise empty street corner, has become one of the most reproduced images in American art, endlessly read as a statement about urban loneliness and isolation even though Hopper himself resisted that kind of literal interpretation. His wife, painter Josephine Nivison Hopper, appears as the model in most of his figure paintings and also kept a meticulous, obsessively detailed ledger of every work he made, a record that's become essential to how his catalog is understood today. His paintings favor sharp artificial light and empty American spaces, gas stations, hotel rooms, theaters, over any recognizable narrative event.