My Daily Art Display’s offering today is in complete contrast to Raphael’s Madonna which I gave you two days ago.  Today I have skipped almost four hundred and fifty years to look at a work of modern art by the American artist Edward Hooper.  It is entitled Nighthawks and portrays three people sitting in a downtown diner.  For Hopper it was to be his most famous painting and one of the most recognisable in American art.

Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, on the Hudson River, in the state of New York in 1882.  He was an outstanding American Realist and American Scene painter as well as a  printmaker.  He came from a middle-class background and was an able student at school where he developed a love of art from an early age.  His parents encouraged this love and helped him develop his talent for drawing.  At the age of seventeen…