English: Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has 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 emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. 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 seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Cette œuvre est dans le domaine public car elle a été publiée aux États-Unis entre 1929 et 1963 et, qu'il y eut ou non un avis de copyright, ce copyright n'a pas été renouvelé. À moins que son auteur ne soit décédé depuis suffisamment longtemps, il reste "copyrighté" dans les pays ou lieux qui n'appliquent pas la règle du terme le plus court pour les œuvres américaines, comme l'Allemagne (70 ans), le Canada (50 ans), la Chine continentale (50 ans ; sauf pour Hong-Kong et Macao), le Mexique (100 ans), la Suisse (70 ans), et d'autres pays avec des traités individuels. Voir Commons:Hirtle chart pour davantage d'explications.