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Over the next several years, Hopper's painting style matured and his signature iconography emerged - from isolated figures in public or private interiors, to sun-soaked architecture, silent streets, and coastal scenes with lighthouses.
His most famous painting, "Nighthawks" (1942), epitomizes his interest in the quiet, introspective moments of everyday life. Despite a slow start, Hopper achieved significant recognition by the 1920s, with his work becoming a staple in major American museums.
In Hopper’s most iconic painting, Nighthawks (1942; Art Institute of Chicago), four customers and a waiter inhabit the brightly lit interior of a city diner at night. They appear lost in their own weariness and private concerns, their disconnection perhaps echoing the wartime anxiety felt by the nation as a whole.
Edward Hopper is widely acknowledged as the most important realist painter of twentieth-century America. But his vision of reality was a selective one, reflecting his own temperament in the empty cityscapes, landscapes, and isolated figures he chose to paint.
Edward Hopper. 1882–1967. Edward Hopper was a keen observer of the everyday, which he transformed through his imagination into works of art that bear his signature tense, enigmatic atmospheres. A reflective and individualistic man, he was deeply attuned to the relationship of the self to the world, and his works increasingly focused on the ...
