Café Terrace at Night

Café Terrace at Night is the painting with which Vincent van Gogh discovered that night could be painted without black. He painted it in Arles in September 1888, on the Place du Forum, setting up his easel in the street under the café’s gaslight and the stars. It measures 80.7 × 65.3 cm, is unsigned, and belongs to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in the Netherlands. Together with The Night Café and Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted the same month, it forms the Arles night trilogy that a year later would lead to The Starry Night.

What it shows

The scene is real and still exists: the terrace of a café on the northeast corner of the Place du Forum in Arles, seen from the street. A yellow awning covers the terrace, lit by a large gas lamp; on the left, tables with customers and a waiter in white; on the right, the cobbled street receding into the distance between blue façades, with passersby and a couple walking away. Above, a dark blue sky scattered with large white stars, and no moon.

It is not an invented scene or one painted from memory: Van Gogh worked on the spot, at night, over several sessions in a row. It is the first time he painted a starry sky, a subject he had been announcing in his letters for months and that would become his obsession over the next two years.

Context: Arles, September 1888

Van Gogh had been in Arles for seven months. He had arrived in February in search of the southern light and a place to found a studio of painters, and in May he had rented the Yellow House. In September 1888 he was in one of the most productive and happiest moments of his life: he had just furnished the house, was expecting Gauguin to arrive in October, and was painting at a pace of several pictures a week. In the same weeks as the terrace came The Night Café (the interior of the station café, painted over three sleepless nights) and Starry Night Over the Rhône, and the first Bedroom in Arles would follow in October.

The idea of painting the night went back a long way. As early as April he had written to Émile Bernard that a starry sky was “a thing that I’d like to try to do,” and in June, writing to Bernard again, he wondered when he would finally do it. That September he would tell Willemien that it often seemed to him that the night “is even more richly coloured than the day.” Literature mattered to him too: in the same letter in which he describes the terrace, he mentions the opening of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, where Paris appears at night with its lighted cafés under the stars. The terrace on the Forum was, in a way, his way of painting that page.

The letter to Willemien: “a painting of night without black”

The best description of the painting comes from Vincent himself, in a letter to his sister Willemien written between September 9 and about September 14, 1888 (letter 678 in the vangoghletters.org edition). He tells her he has been busy with “a new painting of the outside of a café in the evening” and describes it: on the terrace, little figures of people drinking; a huge yellow lantern lighting the terrace, the façade and the pavement, and even projecting light over the cobblestones, which take on a violet-pink tinge; the gables of the houses on the street, under a blue sky, are dark blue or violet, with a green tree.

Then comes the line that sums up the painting: “Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square is coloured pale sulphur, lemon green.” He also tells her that he enormously enjoys painting the night on the spot instead of painting it in the daytime from a drawing. In his following letters to Theo he insists on the same point: the night has to be painted on the spot, not reconstructed in the studio.

Analysis: color, composition and brushwork

Color: complementaries instead of darkness

The whole painting rests on a contrast of complementary colors: the yellow-orange of the gaslight against the blue-violet of the sky and the façades in shadow. Van Gogh had studied the color theory of Delacroix and Chevreul, and here he applies it almost like a lesson: night is not painted by darkening the colors but by cooling them. Black appears nowhere; the deepest shadows are Prussian blue and violet. Where the lamplight touches the awning and the façade, the yellow turns almost white; farther away it cools into green. The cobblestones catch both lights at once, which is why they are painted in alternating patches of orange, violet and blue.

Composition: two diagonals leading into the distance

The terrace and the edge of the sidewalk form one diagonal running down from left to right; the line of the façades in the background forms another one rising. The two converge at the vanishing point, at the far end of the street, where a tiny couple walks away under the arch of a doorway. It is a classic perspective device, but Van Gogh exaggerates it: the ground tilts up toward the viewer and the terrace seems to tip forward, something he would repeat in The Bedroom. The huge awning fills the center and cuts the picture into two worlds: below, the world of the lamps; above, the world of the stars.

Brushwork

The stars are painted with short, thick dabs, larger than they actually look, a device that in The Starry Night would turn into swirls. The sky is built up with vertical and diagonal strokes in several blues, left unblended so that it vibrates. The terrace, by contrast, has almost flat areas of yellow, in the manner of the Japanese prints he collected. And there is a detail you can see in the original: the canvas is not completely covered; in some spots on the ground the priming shows through, proof of how fast he painted.

Fun facts and interpretations

• The stars are the real ones. Several astronomers have compared the sky in the painting with the sky over Arles in mid-September 1888 and agree that the positions are consistent with what Van Gogh could have seen from the square, which confirms that he painted looking at the sky and not from memory.
• A hidden Last Supper? In 2015 the researcher Jared Baxter suggested that the painting hides a Last Supper: twelve figures on the terrace around a central long-haired one, and a cross formed by the window frame behind it. Van Gogh, the son of a Protestant minister, knew religious iconography well, but most historians consider this reading far-fetched: he never mentioned it in his letters, where he does explain the painting in detail.
• The café is still there. The establishment on the corner of the Place du Forum is now called Café Van Gogh and is painted yellow to look like the painting (in 1888 the façade was not yellow: the light was). It is a must-stop for tourists in Arles, with a reputation for being expensive and mediocre; it is worth it for the photo, not for dinner.
• No signature and no title from Vincent. Van Gogh did not sign the painting. It was first exhibited in 1891, after his death, as Café, le soir, and the name it is known by today came later.
• A companion drawing. There is a pen-and-ink drawing of the same scene, made after the painting, which belongs to the Dallas Museum of Art.

Where to see Café Terrace at Night

The painting belongs to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, inside De Hoge Veluwe National Park, an hour and a half from Amsterdam by car or by train plus bus. In the early 20th century Helene Kröller-Müller assembled the second-largest Van Gogh collection in the world (some 90 paintings and 180 drawings), and the terrace is its most famous work, along with The Sower (Sower with Setting Sun) and several Arles portraits. It is not at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where many people look for it; if you are visiting Amsterdam, the Kröller-Müller is the most rewarding day trip for any Van Gogh fan. You will find details on both museums in Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam and in where to see Van Gogh’s paintings.

All the Van Gogh works at the Kröller-Müller Museum that have a page on this site, with visitor information: Van Gogh at the Kröller-Müller Museum.

Artwork details

Related works

• The Yellow House (watercolor): a watercolor related to this work.
• The Night Café (September 1888): the interior, where he tried “to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green.”
• Starry Night Over the Rhône (September 1888): the second night sky of Arles, with the Big Dipper.
• The Starry Night (June 1889): the culmination, painted in Saint-Rémy.
• The Yellow House (September 1888): another yellow façade under a blue sky, a few streets from the Forum.
• The Bedroom (October 1888): the same tilted perspective, indoors.

Main source: letters 678 and 681 by Vincent van Gogh (September 1888), edition of the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute on vangoghletters.org; the Kröller-Müller Museum’s page on the work.