Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh

Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh

A night painting without black

Van Gogh painted this café terrace on the Place du Forum in Arles in September 1888, setting up his easel in the street at night. A lamp under the awning floods the terrace with yellow and orange light; people sit at small round tables, and a waiter in white stands among them. The cobbled street catches the light in patches of colour. Above the dark shapes of the houses, a narrow strip of deep blue sky is scattered with stars painted as bright, flower-like dabs. He wrote to his sister that it was a night painting without any black, made only of blues, violets and greens.

The first starry sky

It is the first of his paintings with a starry sky, a subject he took up again within weeks in Starry Night over the Rhône and returned to at Saint-Rémy the following year. The composition is simple and strong: the terrace and awning on the left, the street running away into the dark, and the yellow of the lamplight set directly against the blue of the night, colours that sit opposite each other on the colour wheel and make each other brighter.

Where it hangs

It is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, and measures 80.7 by 65.3 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 8,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 53 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo · Wikidata Q1025704 · Wikimedia Commons