Edward Hopper spent much of his career working in relative obscurity before Nighthawks made him famous at 60, yet his vision of American solitude — motel rooms, gas stations, empty theaters, sunlit storefronts — had been consistent and fully formed for decades. Born in Nyack, New York in 1882, he trained as an illustrator before committing to painting, and his work draws on a deep engagement with American light: the hard, clear light of New England, the yellow light of late afternoon, the artificial light of modern commercial spaces. He almost never painted figures in direct communication with one another, and the emotional register of his work — suspended, unresolved, neither tragic nor comic — is entirely his own.