Edward Hopper

Hopper is a trained illustrator, who spent five years studying painting under Robert Henri of the Ashcan School of painters who focused on the gritty realitiesof the city. The school influenced his style though he tended to depictthe sense of urban isolation not chaos. Nighthawks was inspired by a restaurant in New York, its composition is carefully constructed but lacks narrative, it has a timeless quality which transcends any particular location. The three customers in the painting seem lost in their own thoughts and seem as remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Hopper denise that he purposely infused any of his painting with symbols of isolation and emptiness but later acknowledged that, "unconsciously, he probably did paint the loneliness of the large city. Hoppers paintings transcend illustration and resist simple narrative interpretation.

Hopper uses narrative in a strange way within his work, his work is usually comprised of carefully constructed composition and lacks real narrative, at leat any direct narrative as he wants the viewer to place their own narratives within his paintings or imagine their own interpretations of what they think he is trying to portray.