Does She Know We're Watching? Edward Hopper's Night Windows

In eighteen seventy-nine, an Englishman riding New York's brand-new elevated railway noticed something that made him uneasy. The trains ran about thirty feet above the street, so close to the buildings that he could see straight into the rooms of a hotel. It must be, he wrote, not very pleasant for the people inside.

Fifty years later, an American painter made a picture of exactly that feeling.

At first, we see the corner of a dark building at night, with three windows lit from inside. In the middle window, a woman in a pink slip bends forward. We cannot see her face, because the top of the window cuts it off. To the left, a curtain blows out into the night. And to the right, there is only a red glow.

And yet, what makes this painting so strange is not the woman. It is us. There is no street below, and no window across the way. We are floating in the dark, at the height of the third floor. So where are we standing?

## 2 · Identify + promise `0:50`

This painting is called Night Windows. Edward Hopper painted it in nineteen twenty-eight, and today it belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The museum says the woman has no idea that anyone is watching her. But a New York critic looked at the same picture and answered in three words: don't buy it.

And fourteen years later, Hopper would build this same light into one of the most famous paintings in America.

So in this video, we are going to find out where we are standing when we look at this picture. And to understand that, we first need to know who Edward Hopper was, and why it took him so long to get here.

## 3 · The man `1:35`

Edward Hopper was born in eighteen eighty-two in Nyack, a small river town just north of New York City. He studied painting in Manhattan, and as a young man he went to Paris three times. And then, for ten years, almost nothing happened.

In nineteen thirteen, he sold one painting for two hundred and fifty dollars. After that, he did not sell another painting for a decade. To pay the rent, he drew pictures for magazines and advertisements, work he hated. Years later, he said that what he had really wanted was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

So in the evenings, he made etchings, pictures scratched into copper plates and printed by hand. He wrote the prices in the margins in ink. This one, a couple talking late at night on the elevated train, was eighteen dollars. And this one, Night Shadows, was thirty.

Look closely at Night Shadows. We are high above an empty street at night. A man walks along, and the shadow of a lamp post stretches across the pavement. One museum says it feels as if we were looking down from an elevated train platform. Keep this picture in mind, because it will matter later.

Then, in nineteen twenty-three, at the age of forty-one, his luck changed. He spent the summer painting beside an artist named Jo Nivison. That autumn, the Brooklyn Museum bought one of his watercolors. The next year, at a show in a New York gallery, every watercolor sold, and then five more. That summer, Edward and Jo were married.

From then on, Jo posed for almost every woman he painted. And she kept a set of record books, with a note about every picture he made. Remember those books, too.

By nineteen twenty-eight, Hopper was forty-six. He lived and worked at the top of a building on Washington Square, up seventy-four stairs, and it was his biggest year of New York pictures. One of them was Night Windows.

## 4 · The painting `4:05`

So let us look at it again, slowly.

First, the light. Notice that all of it comes from inside. The building itself is dark, almost black, and the night around it is darker still. Hopper has switched off the whole city and left on only three windows.

In the window on the left, the curtain has blown out through the open sash, so we know it is a warm night with a breeze.

In the middle window is the woman, bent over, perhaps looking for something, or getting ready for bed. Behind her, we can see a radiator, a green floor and the red corner of a bed. But the top of the window hides her head, so we never see her face, and she could be anyone at all.

And in the window on the right, there is nobody, only a hot red glow, from a lamp perhaps.

And along the bottom runs the dark ledge of the building, curving across the whole picture. One of the first curators to show Hopper's work compared this kind of view to the edge of a stage. We are the audience, sitting in the dark, and the play is someone's ordinary evening.

But look at what is missing. There is no street, no window opposite, no balcony. Nothing is holding us up. We are hanging in the night at the height of the third floor, looking in. So where are we standing?

## 5 · The shop `5:50`

Before we answer that, I would like to remind you of something. If you would like to have Night Windows in your own home, you can now do so through our website. In the link in the description, you will find this painting and the other Hopper paintings from this video. You will also find more than eighteen hundred great works from the history of art. And every print you order helps us keep making videos like this one.

Now then, let us continue. Where are we standing?

## 6 · The turn `6:20`

Remember the Englishman on the elevated train? Fifty years later, those trains were still running high above Manhattan, past the windows of apartments and offices, and Hopper rode them often.

Long afterwards, a museum asked him where one of his night paintings came from, a picture of an office seen from outside. He wrote back that it was probably first suggested by many rides on the L train after dark. The glimpses into lit offices, he said, were so fleeting that they left fresh and vivid impressions on his mind.

Hopper never said that about Night Windows. But in July nineteen twenty-eight, the same year he painted it, he wrote an essay about another painter. In it, he praised something that he said very few artists ever try for: the inside and the outside of a building, seen at the same time. He called it a common visual sensation.

That is where we are standing. We are where any New Yorker stood every night, on a passing train, on a rooftop, or at a window across the street. Hopper did not paint a secret. He painted something everyone in the city saw, and pretended not to.

And that leaves us with two ways of reading the woman in pink.

In the first, from the Museum of Modern Art and the curator Lloyd Goodrich, she is completely unaware of us. We are, as Goodrich put it, detached spectators watching unconscious actors. In this reading, the painting is about how alone people can be in a crowded city.

In the second, from the critic R. C. Baker, the shade is open on purpose. Anyone who has lived beside the elevated train, he wrote, knows that an open shade invites fleeting thrills. That goes for the people on the train, and for the people at the window. In this reading, both sides know the game.

And Hopper himself? When critics told him what his pictures meant, he only said: it may be true, and it may not be true.

But he never stopped painting that light. And fourteen years later, it turned into something much bigger.

## 7 · After Night Windows `8:05`

A year after Night Windows, the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. Yet Hopper's prices held. In nineteen thirty-three, the Museum of Modern Art gave him a show of his own, and Night Windows hung in it. The museum wrote that he painted scenes through hotel windows, and that he painted them without satire.

Then, in January nineteen forty-two, Hopper finished this.

Look at how it is built. The long lines of the diner pull our eyes toward a point outside the picture. And once again, the whole city is switched off. The only light comes from inside, falling out onto an empty street. Goodrich called it an oasis of light in the midnight city, spotlighting and isolating the people inside. It is the same idea as Night Windows: a lit room, framed by darkness, and us, outside, looking in.

One museum even traces this light back to the etching we saw earlier, Night Shadows, the empty street seen from above.

And the name? Remember Jo's record books. Next to this painting, she described the man at the counter as a night hawk, with a beak. Edward posed for the men himself, using a mirror, and Jo posed for the woman. So the name of Nighthawks probably began as a joke about a man's nose.

That spring, the Art Institute of Chicago bought it for three thousand dollars.

## 8 · Close `9:20`

So now, I would love to know what you think. Look at the woman in the window one more time. Does she know that we are watching? Yes or no? Tell me in the comments.

And if this light stayed with you, there is another painter who went looking for light, and found it in the furnaces of England. That story is right here.