Composition and narrative

In Nighthawks, The Dream, and The Calling of Saint Matthew, angles within the painting corral the eye to an insular drama.

Caravaggio’s famous composition, The Calling of Saint Matthew, uses the technique of chiaroscuro, where a beam of light points to the Biblical calling of the soon-to-be saint.

For Hopper’s painting, Nighthawks, the sharp delineation of inside and outside, solitary and together, closeness and distance, expresses a contemporary crisis of loneliness in the mid-20th century.

Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, a surreal landscape with a reclining nude, does quite the opposite of Nighthawks and The Calling of Saint Matthew. The Dream’s abstracted vegetation fills the canvas such that the figure feels immersed in the fantastical scene.