Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper painted American loneliness: empty streets at dawn, figures alone in hotel rooms and diners, light falling across a wall. His career started slowly, and he supported himself for years as an illustrator before museums began buying his work in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1913 until his death in 1967 he lived and worked in a top floor studio at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village.

His best known painting, Nighthawks of 1942, hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, in gallery 262. After his death his widow, the painter Josephine Hopper, left their joint collection of more than three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is why the Whitney, at the south end of the High Line, holds more of him than anywhere else.