Amid World War II in 1942, Edward Hopper painted one of the best-known images of twentieth-century art and his most celebrated masterpieces,“Nighthawks”.

The painting presents a corner diner in an urban environment, frozen in the dark hours of the night, a scene lit by ceiling-mounted fluorescents eclipsed by a long lip of a flat roof balanced on thin beams bracing tall, wide glass windows. We’re voyeurs to the diner’s world, catching four figures dressed in black, blue, red, and white, who command our attention from the vacant street outside.

Hopper’s masterpiece with its carefully constructed composition presents a quintessential moment of wrinkled stillness against the melodrama of WWII across the ocean, reminding us the quiet night is never simple.