Post-Impressionism

The Night Café

Van Gogh painted The Night Café in just three nights in September 1888, working from 9 p.m. until dawn each session — he wrote to his brother Theo that he had deliberately stayed awake to capture the feeling of the place.

Vincent van Gogh · 1888

Read history Open artist

Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

Vincent van Gogh

Movement / period

Post-Impressionism

Medium

painting

Location

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

He described his color choices in a letter as an attempt to express "the terrible passions of humanity" — the clashing red walls and green ceiling were intentional psychological violence, not decoration.

Highlights

Facts & legends

Van Gogh painted The Night Café in just three nights in September 1888, working from 9 p.m. until dawn each session — he wrote to his brother Theo that he had deliberately stayed awake to capture the feeling of the place.
He described his color choices in a letter as an attempt to express "the terrible passions of humanity" — the clashing red walls and green ceiling were intentional psychological violence, not decoration.
The painting was sold by van Gogh himself for 30 francs to pay off a debt to the café owner, Joseph Ginoux, making it one of the very few works he sold during his lifetime.
Yale University acquired it in 1961 from the collection of Stephen Carlton Clark, the Singer Sewing Machine heir, who had bought it in 1933 for around $34,000 — a staggering sum during the Great Depression.
X-ray analysis has confirmed van Gogh made almost no underdrawing — he painted directly onto the canvas with almost no preliminary sketching, which explains the raw, pressurized energy of the brushwork.
The billiard table at the center of the composition is slightly warped in perspective, almost cartoonishly so — art historians have argued this was deliberate, a way of making the viewer feel the room is unstable and threatening.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

More details How Van Gogh spent three sleepless nights inside an Arles café, turned red and green into psychological weapons, gave the canvas an unusual written title, and sent it on a journey through Moscow to Yale.

Three sleepless nights

The café became a studio

Van Gogh worked through three nights at the Café de la Gare in Arles and slept by day.

The proprietor Joseph Ginoux stands behind the billiard table while exhausted customers cling to the walls.

Van Gogh painted the Café de la Gare interior over three consecutive nights, sleeping by day. He ate there and knew owner Joseph Ginoux, who stands by the billiard table. The all-night room sheltered people with nowhere else to go. This is observation from a space the artist inhabited.

Red against green

Colour was meant to disturb

To Willemien he counted six or seven reds and as many greens.

To Theo he described a place where one might ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

He told Theo he wanted a place where one could ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime, expressing 'terrible human passions' through red and green. Six or seven reds oppose as many greens. Colour is deliberately not locally true; it produces bodily irritation instead of comfort.

The table pushes back

Perspective carries the unease

The green table, long shadow, and plunging floorboards thrust the room toward us.

Van Gogh lets spatial imbalance do the work of facial expression.

Floor lines rush toward the door yet seem to push us back. The empty billiard table blocks the centre; lamps glare as discs without gentle shadow. The room opens and traps at once. We see an exit without feeling able to reach it.

Signature as title

An unusual inscription

At lower right he wrote both Vincent and le café de nuit.

The interior should not be confused with the more inviting Café Terrace at Night painted nearby.

Van Gogh signed and titled the canvas in its corner, unusually. At the same time he painted Café Terrace at Night, almost opposite in mood: open sky, blue air, welcoming gold. Night colour had no single meaning; it could invite or threaten.

Moscow to Yale

A painting caught in history

Ivan Morozov owned it before Soviet nationalisation; Stephen Clark bought it in 1933 and left it to Yale in 1961.

A later ownership challenge failed, adding legal history to its restless visual history.

Once owned by Ivan Morozov, the painting was nationalized and sold by Soviet authorities. Yale received it in 1961 from Stephen Clark. A later ownership challenge failed in court, adding forced movement to the room's uneasy history.

Official sources