Cafe Terrace at Night, also known as The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, is among the best known paintings of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. Even today, visitors to the site can take the place at the north eastern corner of the Place du Forum where the artist set up his easel and made the painting. He looked south towards the artificially lighted terrace of the popular coffee house, as well as into the enforced darkness of the rue leading up to the building structure in the back comprising the town house (to the left, not pictured) and, beyond this structure, the tower of a former church (now Musée lapidaire).
This is the first painting where Van Gogh utilized a starry night background. He later painted star filled skies in Starry Night Over the Rhone, which was painted later the same month, and the better known Starry Night a year later.
After finishing Café Terrace at Night, Van Gogh wrote a letter to his sister expressing his enthusiasm:
“ I was only interrupted by my work on a new painting representing the exterior of a night café. On the terrace there are small figures of people drinking. An immense yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the facade, the side walk and even casts light on the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone. The gables of the houses, like a fading road below a blue sky studded with stars, are dark blue or violet with a green tree. Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colors itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges”.
Café Terrace at Night was painted in Arles, France, mid September 1888. It is currently in collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo, the Netherlands.
This product was added to our catalog on Friday 01 May, 2009.
