The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin, Vincent van Gogh, 1887. Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 46.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Vincent van Gogh · 1887
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 55.5 × 46.5 cm
- Held by
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Starry Night
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sunflowers
The National Gallery, London
What to look at
Two years after The Potato Eaters and the palette is unrecognisable. Agostina Segatori ran the Café du Tambourin on the boulevard de Clichy, where Van Gogh exhibited Japanese prints and, for a while, paid for meals with paintings. She sits at one of the café's tambourine-shaped tables — the gimmick the place was named for — with a glass and a cigarette. What has changed is not just that the colours are brighter but that he has stopped mixing them on the palette: the blues, pinks and yellows sit next to each other in separate strokes and mix in your eye, which is what he had been watching the Impressionists do all year. The background is the giveaway about his other obsession. Those are Japanese prints on the café wall, painted loosely but unmistakably, and within a year that flat outlined way of making a shape will be running the whole picture.