Vincent van Gogh | The Night Cafe in the Place Lamartine in Arles

About The Night Cafe by Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh painted The Night Café in September 1888, in the Café de la Gare in Arles where he was lodging at the time. He worked on it across three consecutive nights and slept through the days, painting the room while it was still in use around him.

He was blunt about what he was after. In a letter to his brother Theo he wrote that he had tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green — that the café was a place where one could ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. Blood-red walls meet a harsh green ceiling; four gas lamps burn with sickly haloes; the billiard table casts a shadow like a hole in the floor, and the floorboards tilt up towards the viewer so the room seems to slide.

A handful of drinkers slump at the edges. The landlord stands in white beside the billiard table, watching. It is one of the least comfortable pictures Van Gogh ever made, and he knew it — he called it one of the ugliest he had painted, and meant it as a description of what he had achieved rather than a complaint.

Own a hand-painted Night Cafe

This picture lives or dies on the strength of two colours. Van Gogh put blood red directly against acid green at close to full saturation, because complementaries at that intensity refuse to settle — the eye cannot hold both at once and the room seems to vibrate. Every printing process compresses saturation to stay inside the range of its inks, and as soon as those two colours soften the painting turns into a pleasant picture of a café interior. Mixed from pigment and laid down by hand in oils, the reds and greens stay at the strength Van Gogh needed, and the room becomes uncomfortable again — which is the entire point of it.