Nighthawks (painting)

A 1942 painting by Edward Hopper, showing some people in a diner (that just happens to be on a street corner of a city) late at night, illustrating their loneliness and despair.

Since it is one of the most recognizable paintings, it's often a case of Art Imitates Art. So famous is this exact setup that most people throughout the industrialized world will immediately recognize the scene, whether or not they know the name of the original painting.

Compare Pietà Plagiarism and The Scream.

References in popular culture:

Comic Books

  • In Transmetropolitan Spider and his assistants hang out in a diner based on Hopper's painting. It's called "Hopper's", just to drive it home.
  • "Hopper's" diner in Batman: Year One, featuring Lt. Gordon and Essin eating in a diner after their shift ends.
  • Parodied in the first issue of The Tick.

Film

Live-Action TV

  • Dead Like Me homaged the painting in the episode appropriately titled "Nighthawks" (season 1, episode 12, if anyone is interested).
  • That '70s Show lampshaded this with Kitty and Red in a diner, in the roles of the woman in the red dress and the suit-clad man sitting next to her. Kitty remarks on how everything feels so familiar.
  • CSI, in one of the promo posters.

Music

  • Tom Waits' album Nighthawks at the Diner is an homage.
  • The cover of Orchestral Manoeuvres' album Crush is done is in a Hopper-esque style and shows the corner on which the diner is situated, but from a different angle.

Newspaper Comics

  • One of the Pearls Before Swine collections is titled Nighthogs in an obvious reference. The cover is a Shout-Out to the painting as well.
  • A Peanuts Sunday Strip has this in its first panel, with Woodstock and three other birds. See page 75 of Around the World in 45 Years.
  • De Kiekeboes: Fanny and Inspecteur Sapperdeboere sat in this restaurant in the album "Blond en Blau W".

Video Games

  • You can buy a decorative painting in The Sims 2 that closely resembles it.

Western Animation

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