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Hopper painted 'Nighthawks' in January 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor, when New York was practicing blackout drills and coastal cities were learning to dim their windows against the possibility of attack. The all-night diner he painted glows uncannily bright in a city that was, at that exact moment, being told to turn its lights off.

For nearly two decades before that, Hopper worked mainly as a commercial illustrator, a trade he said he disliked, and did not have a real breakthrough as a painter until 1924, when a sold-out watercolor exhibition let him quit illustration for good. That same year he married Josephine Nivison, a former classmate under the painter Robert Henri and herself a working artist, who from then on insisted on being the only woman who ever modeled for him. The diner's lone female customer in 'Nighthawks,' like most women in his later paintings, is her.

The Art Institute of Chicago bought 'Nighthawks' within months of its completion, for $3,000. Josephine died in 1968, a year after Hopper, and left the Whitney Museum of American Art more than 3,000 works between them, his paintings and her own, which the Whitney still holds as the largest single Hopper collection anywhere.