Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Café Terrace at Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Oil on canvas, 80.7 × 65.3 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo 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
Café Terrace at Night
Vincent van Gogh · 1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 80.7 × 65.3 cm
- Held by
- Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
- 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
The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
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
Van Gogh painted this outdoors at night on the Place du Forum in Arles, which is a harder thing to do than it sounds — he wrote about working by gaslight with candles fixed to his hat and easel. The picture has no black in it at all, and he was proud of that. The night sky is a deep blue-green scattered with yellow-white stars; the shadow under the awning is violet; the darkest value anywhere is the blue of the building fronts. Everything else is lit by the one gas lamp above the terrace, which he paints as a flood of lemon yellow spilling onto the cobbles and bleaching the tablecloths. The receding line of the terrace does most of the compositional work, pulling you down the street and into the dark where the figures are barely more than marks. The café is still there, repainted yellow to match.