The Night Café

The Night Café is among the most celebrated and famous works of Vincent Van Gogh. It was painted in Arles in1888 and depicts the interior of the Café de la Gareon, 30 Place Lamartine, a place Van Gogh himself spend a lot of time. In fact, in one of the more humorous passages of his letters , he wrote his brother Theo that as owner Ginoux had taken so much of his money, he had in turn told Ginoux that it was about time he took his revenge by painting the café.

The depiction of the Café is rendered in red and green colors with yellow light coming from the gas ceiling lamps on the room. A few patrons can be seen at the different tables and the owner, Ginoux, can be seen in white standing to the right. A half curtailed doorway, supposedly leading to more private quarters, can be seen in the back of the room. Unlike the café depicted in The Café Terrace at Night, this is not an entirely welcoming café. Indeed, Van Gogh himself wrote about this painting:

“I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.”

The Night Café is considered among Van Gogh’s most esteemed master pieces, even as the artist himself noted it as among his most ugly works. The use of color in the painting is what Van Gogh himself referred to as suggestive color and with its use, he moved away from the neutral observer stance of the impressionists towards the interpreting observation of impressionism.

The Night Café can today be found on display at the art gallery at Yale University.