1888-09 · Arles · Knot of Motif

The Night Café

"It is one of the ugliest pictures I have done." Those are his own words, from the letter.

F463 The Night Café 1888
F467 Café Terrace at Night 1888

Synaesthetic Precision

"Terrible passions" — he did not paint the passion itself, he painted a room capable of producing it. The tilted floor unbalances the foot; the over-bright lamps press on the temples; the red-green combat leaves the eye nowhere to rest. He was building an emotion machine: a viewer would feel the unease in the body before naming it. This is synaesthetic precision at its most violent — a place that strikes the body before it reaches the mind.

The Colour Experimenter

Red and green are complementaries: the standard practice is to use them to harmonise each other. He did the opposite — pushed them both close to maximum saturation, set them to bite each other. In a letter he called it the extreme of his colour experiments. A year earlier, painting the Sunflowers, the test was yellow against yellow. Now it was red against green. He was searching for the upper limit of every pair of colour tensions. The colour experimenter chose, for the first time, dissonance as the target.

Painting

The Night Café, oil on canvas, 72.4 × 92.1 cm. An ordinary all-night café — red walls, a green billiard table, four yellow lamps floating like haloes beneath the ceiling. The floor tilts. At the back, a bar mirror; the owner stands at centre in white. This painting breaks every rule of colour harmony: red and green are not led to agree, they are deliberately pressed to the point of combat. The light is not warm. The light is toxic.

Letter

September 1888. He wrote: "I have tried to express the terrible human passions with red and green." Another letter: "The café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime." A third: "I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house." Then his own verdict: "It is one of the ugliest paintings I have done. It is the equivalent, though different, of the Potato Eaters."

Place

Arles, Place Lamartine — the Café de la Gare, next door to the Yellow House he was about to move into. All-night place: stranded sailors, drifters, anyone who could not pay for a bed. He painted there three nights running, slept by day, owed the owner rent. This was September 1888 — five weeks before Gauguin, three months before the ear. He painted the room that ruins people while living one wall away from it.

Synaesthetic Precision

The Colour Experimenter

before

Arles was not only orchards and starry nights; there were also his solitary nights — the café was where he went when he could not sleep.

now

He wrote (letter 676): "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green." And also: "It is one of the ugliest pictures I have done." These are his own words, not anyone else's.

after

Treating colour as a danger signal — that approach never wholly disappeared from the later pictures; it only changed form.

Events

1888-09-06 Synaesthetic Precision · Letter 677
Decided to paint the Café de la Gare next door to the Yellow House. 'The café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.'
1888-09-08 The Colour Experimenter · Letter 676
Stayed up three nights in the café painting The Night Café. Slept at home during the day
1888-09-09 The Colour Experimenter · Letter 676
'I have tried to express the terrible human passions with red and green.' Complementaries used for the first time as a tool to manufacture unease
1888-09-11 Synaesthetic Precision · Letter 677
Wrote: 'I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house.' Translating the abstract 'powers of darkness' into the concrete physical structure of an image
1888-09-15 The Translator · Letter 678
Completed Café Terrace at Night — the other side of the same city: blue sky, stars, warm-toned terrace. The two paintings together hold his two vocabularies for night
1888-09-16 The Ferocious Reader · Letter 677
Self-judgement after completion: 'It is one of the ugliest paintings I have done. It is the equivalent, though different, of the Potato Eaters.' He placed the Night Café beside the masterpiece of his Dutch years

From the Letters

J'ai cherché à exprimer avec le rouge et le vert les terribles passions humaines.

I have tried to express the terrible human passions with red and green.

Letter 676

Le café est un endroit où l'on peut se ruiner, devenir fou, commettre des crimes.

The café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

Letter 677

J'ai cherché à exprimer en quelque sorte les puissances des ténèbres dans un assommoir.

I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house.

Letter 677

C'est un des tableaux les plus laids que j'aie faits. C'est l'équivalent, quoique différent, des mangeurs de pommes de terre.

It is one of the ugliest paintings I have done. It is the equivalent, though different, of the Potato Eaters.

Letter 677

Letter Sources

Van Gogh letter records referenced on this page, linked to the Van Gogh Letters Project. vangoghletters.org

Technique Evidence

This work appears as evidence in this site’s technique-evolution axis.

The Shattering Stroke 1888.02 – 1889.05 Open period F467 / JH1580 Café Terrace at Night Brushstroke Representative of directional brushwork
The Shattering Stroke 1888.02 – 1889.05 Open period F463 / JH1575 The Night Café Colour Representative of the changed colour system Brushstroke Representative of directional brushwork