Edward Hopper, Study for Nighthawks, 1941 or 1942

Narrator: This is the last drawing Hopper did for Nighthawks. He may even have made it after he’d started the painting. 

Carter Foster: There are some differences that it has with the painting, but there are many, many similarities. And we can see him working out the very subtle shifts in points of view spatially that interested him a great deal.We can also see how he was working out the qualities of light that interested him by putting white chalk on the sheet to indicate sort of this harsh fluorescent light that was coming out of the diner and contrasting that to the space of the street with the rich darkness of the chalk, and getting all these subtle modulations in this particular sheet.