Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting, “Nighthawks” was his best-known piece of art. He commented that, “Nighthawks seems to be the way I think of a night street. I didn’t see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” Later, he again downplayed the loneliness aspect of the painting by stressing that it was just “a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet”.

Source: Hopper by Rolf G. Renner, Taschen, 2020 originally published 1991. Painting, “Nighthawks” by Hopper owned by Daniel Rich. Public domain.