The Night Café (original French title:
Le Café de nuit) is an oil painting created in Arles in September 1888, by
Vincent van GoghVincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age...
. Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature.
The interior depicted is the
Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel and his wife Marie Ginoux, who in November 1888 posed for Van Gogh's and Gauguin's
ArlésienneL'Arlésienne, L'Arlésienne , or Portrait of Madame Ginoux are titles given to six paintings by Vincent van Gogh, painted in Arles, November 1888 , and in Auvers, February 1890...
; a bit later, Joseph Ginoux evidently posed for both artists, too.
The painting was executed on industrial primed canvas of size 30 (French standard).
The Night Café (original French title:
Le Café de nuit) is an oil painting created in Arles in September 1888, by
Vincent van GoghVincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age...
. Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature.
The interior depicted is the
Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel and his wife Marie Ginoux, who in November 1888 posed for Van Gogh's and Gauguin's
ArlésienneL'Arlésienne, L'Arlésienne , or Portrait of Madame Ginoux are titles given to six paintings by Vincent van Gogh, painted in Arles, November 1888 , and in Auvers, February 1890...
; a bit later, Joseph Ginoux evidently posed for both artists, too.
Description
The painting was executed on industrial primed canvas of size 30 (French standard). It depicts the interior of the cafe, with a half-curtained doorway in the center background leading, presumably, to more private quarters. Five customers sit at tables along the walls to the left and right, and a waiter in a light coat, to one side of a pool table near the center of the room, stands facing the viewer.
The five customers depicted in the scene have been described as "three drunks and derelicts in a large public room [...] huddled down in sleep or stupor." One scholar wrote, "The cafe was an all-night haunt of local down-and-outs and prostitutes, who are depicted slouched at tables and drinking together at the far end of the room.".
In wildly contrasting, vivid colours, the ceiling is green, the upper walls red, the glowing, gas ceiling lamps and floor largely yellow. The paint is applied thickly, with many of the lines of the room leading toward the door in the back. The perspective looks somewhat downward toward the floor.
Genesis
In a jocular passage of a letter Van Gogh wrote his brother, Theo, the artist said Ginoux had taken so much of his money that he'd told the cafe owner it was time to take his revenge by painting the place.
In August 1888 the artist told his brother in a letter:
In the first days of September 1888, Van Gogh sat up for three consecutive nights to paint the picture, sleeping during the day. Little later, he sent the water-colour, copying the composition and again simplyfing the colour scheme on order to meet the simplicity of
Japanese woodblock prints' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...
.
Van Gogh's
Cafe Terrace at NightCafé Terrace at Night, also known as The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, is an oil painting executed by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh on an industrially primed canvas of size 25 in Arles, France, mid September 1888...
, showing outdoor tables, a street scene and the night sky, was painted in Arles at about the same time. It depicts a different cafe, a larger establishment on the Place du Forum.
Van Gogh on the painting
Van Gogh wrote many letters to his brother Theo van Gogh, and often included details of his latest work. The artist wrote his brother more than once about
The Night Café. According to
Meyer SchapiroMeyer Schapiro was an American 20th century art historian. Schapiro was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania.-Biography:...
, "there are few works on which he [van Gogh] has written with more conviction."
In one of the letters he describes this painting:
The next day (September 9), he wrote Theo: "In my picture of the
Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin."
He also wrote: "It is color not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist, but color to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament."
The violent exaggeration of the colours and the thick texture of the paint made the picture "one of the ugliest pictures I have done", van Gogh wrote at one point. He also called it "the equivalent though different, of
The Potato EatersThe Potato Eaters is a painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh that he painted in April 1885 while in Nuenen, Netherlands. It is housed in the Van Gogh Museum of Amsterdam....
", which it resembles somewhat in its use of lamplight and concerns for the condition of people in need.
Soon after its execution, Van Gogh incorporated this painting into his
Décoration for the Yellow HouseThe Décoration for the Yellow House was the main project Vincent van Gogh focused in Arles, from August 1888 till his breakdown the day before Christmas. This Décoration had no pre-defined form or size, the central idea of the Décoration grew step by step, with the progress of his work. Starting...
.
Reaction of critics and scholars
The work has been called one of van Gogh's masterpieces and one of his most famous.
Unlike typical
ImpressionistImpressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...
works, the painter does not project a neutral stance towards the world or an attitude of enjoyment of the beauty of nature or of the moment. The painting is an instance of Van Gogh's use of what he called "suggestive colour" or, as he would soon term it, "arbitrary colour" in which the artist infused his works with his emotions, typical of what was later called
ExpressionismExpressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. It sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality...
.
The red and green of the walls and ceiling are an "oppressive combination", and the lamps are "sinister features" with orange-and-green halos, according to Nathaniel Harris. "The top half of the canvas creates its basic mood, as any viewer can verify by looking at it with one or the other half of the reproduction covered up; the bottom half supplies the 'facts.'" The thick paint adds a surreal touch of waviness to the table tops, billiard table and floor. The viewer is left with a feeling of seediness and despair, Harris wrote. "The scene might easily be banal and dispiriting; instead, it is dispiriting but also terrible."
The objects of pleasure (billiard table, wine bottles and glasses) are contrasted in the picture with the "few human beings absorbed in their individual loneliness and despair", Antonia Lant commented.
The perspective of the scene is one of its most powerful effects, according to various critics. Schapiro described the painting's "absorbing perspective which draws us headlong past empty chairs and tables into hidden depths behind a distant doorway — an opening like the silhouette of the standing figure." Lant described it as a "shocking perspectival rush, which draws us, by the converging diagonals of floorboards nad billiard table, towards the mysterious, courtained doorway beyond." Harris wrote that the perspective "pitches the viewer forward into the room, towards the half-curtained private quarters, and also creates a sense of vertigo and distorted vision, familiar from nightmares." Schapiro also noted, "To the impulsive rush of these converging lines he opposes the broad horizontal band of red, full of scattered objects [...]"
Gauguin's competition piece
Soon after his arrival in Arles,
Paul GauguinEugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionist painter. His bold experimentation with colouring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way...
painted the same location, as a background to his portrait of Madame Ginoux. It was also acquired by Ivan Morozov and now hangs in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
Pedigree
Van Gogh used the picture to settle debts with Ginoux, the landlord said to be depicted (standing) in it. Formerly a highlight of the Ivan Morozov collection in
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
, the painting was sold by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s. Via Wildenstein the painting was acquired by
Stephen Carlton ClarkStephen Carlton Clark DSM, was an American art collector, newspaper publisher, benefactor and founder of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York...
who bequeathed it to
the art galleryThe Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting,...
of
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
. On March 24, 2009, Yale sued one Pierre Konowaloff, Morozov's purported great-grandson, to quiet Yale's title to the work. Konowaloff had allegedly asserted a claim to own the painting on the ground that the Soviets had invalidly nationalized it.
See also
- Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its creation by Empress...