夜游者

Hopper finished this on the 21st of January 1942, about six weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into the war. He never spelled out a connection, but the country he was painting had just gone dark. Cities were rehearsing blackouts, and here is a single bright box of a diner burning through the small hours while the street around it lies empty and shut. Three customers and a counterman sit inside the green-tinged glow, close together but not really speaking, each folded into their own quiet. The detail people always come back to is the one that isn't there. The diner has no visible door. Hopper seals the glass all the way around, so there is no obvious way in and no way out, which is a large part of why the room feels like a trap made of light. He said he was probably, without meaning to, painting the loneliness of a big city. The place was loosely inspired by an eatery on Greenwich Avenue in New York, near where he lived, though he insisted he had simplified it heavily and was not copying a real corner.