Post-Impressionism

The Night Café

Vincent van Gogh, 1888

The Night Café (Le Café de nuit) is a September 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh of an all-night café in Arles, its red walls and green ceiling lit by gas lamps. It is in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Artist: Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1888
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 72.4 × 92.1 cm
Collection: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Movement: Post-Impressionism

What you are looking at

The room is blood red. A green ceiling presses down; the floor, a hot yellow-orange, tilts up steeply toward us, so we seem to be looking down into the space. In the center stands a billiard table, green with a long dark shadow, a cue resting on it. Four gas lamps hang from the ceiling, each wrapped in rings of yellow and orange light. Around the walls, a few customers slump at small tables, heads down, alone or in pairs. At the back, a man in a white coat, the proprietor, stands beside the table and looks straight out at us. A clock on the back wall reads just after midnight.

Vincent van Gogh painted Le Café de nuit in Arles in early September 1888. It measures about 72 by 92 centimeters and is in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

The café

It was the Café de la Gare on the Place Lamartine, near the Yellow House where Van Gogh lived, run by Joseph-Michel and Marie Ginoux. It stayed open all night for travelers, drinkers and people with nowhere else to go. Van Gogh lodged above it for a time and owed the owner money; he joked to his brother Theo that he would take his revenge by painting the place. He worked on it for three nights, sleeping during the day.

What does it mean?

Van Gogh explained his intentions in a letter to Theo: "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green." The clashing complementary colors are meant to be uncomfortable. He called the café a place "where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime," and described the picture as one of the ugliest he had made, and the equivalent, though different, of The Potato Eaters.

Looking closely

Look at the lamps. The halos around them are drawn in concentric strokes of yellow and green, more like suns than gaslight, and they make the whole room seem to vibrate. The perspective is deliberately exaggerated: the floorboards rush toward a vanishing point at the back, and the billiard table's shadow cuts across them. The few figures are small and huddled, overwhelmed by the space.

Where to see it

The painting has been in the Yale University Art Gallery since 1961. Compare the warm outdoor night of Café Terrace at Night, painted the same month, and see Sunflowers and The Starry Night.

Questions & answers

Where is van Gogh's The Night Café?

The Night Café (Le Café de nuit), painted in Arles in September 1888, is in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. It came to Yale in 1961 and is one of the best-known Van Gogh paintings in an American university collection.

What did van Gogh say about The Night Café?

In a letter to his brother Theo he wrote that he had tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. He called the café a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.

Where was the café in The Night Café?

It was the Café de la Gare on the Place Lamartine in Arles, near Van Gogh's Yellow House, run by Joseph-Michel and Marie Ginoux. It stayed open all night. Marie Ginoux later posed for Van Gogh's portraits L'Arlésienne.

More by the artist

Vincent van Gogh

All works →

Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette

Vincent van Gogh · 1886

A café terrace glows yellow under a lit awning on a cobbled street at night, beneath a deep blue sky scattered with stars — Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night, 1888 — Café Terrace at Night
Vincent van Gogh · September 1888

Five peasants with coarse faces share a dish of potatoes and pour coffee at a small table under a hanging oil lamp in a dark cottage — Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885 — The Potato Eaters
Vincent van Gogh · April–May 1885

Black crows fly low over a wind-tossed golden wheat field under a dark, stormy blue sky, with three paths cutting through the wheat — Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, July 1890 — Wheatfield with Crows
Vincent van Gogh · July 1890

A huge bouquet of blue-violet irises with long green leaves bursts from an ochre vase against a bright yellow wall, stems spilling onto the table — Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1890 — Irises (Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background)
Vincent van Gogh · 1890

An old man in a blue suit sits hunched on a wooden chair by a small fire, fists pressed to his eyes — Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity's Gate, 1890 — At Eternity's Gate
Vincent van Gogh · 1890

Swirling blue and yellow night sky with glowing stars and a crescent moon above a sleeping village and a dark flame-like cypress — Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889 — The Starry Night (van Gogh)
Vincent van Gogh · 1889

A red-bearded man in a grey felt hat, lilac jacket outlined in cobalt and a pale blue bow tie looks out against a vivid blue background — Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (or Portrait of Theo van Gogh), 1887 — Portrait of Theo van Gogh (Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat)
Vincent van Gogh · 1887

Also painted in 1888

The same year

A red-bearded man in a blue smock holds a palette and brushes beside an easel, looking out with a tense stare against a pale background — Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter, 1887–88 — Self-Portrait as a Painter
Vincent van Gogh · 1887–88

Two versions of a vase of yellow sunflowers, fresh and wilting, against yellow backgrounds, side by side — Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888 and 1889 — Sunflowers
Vincent van Gogh · 1888–89

Kindred works

You may also study

A red-bearded man in a pale blue jacket gazes sideways against a background of swirling blue and turquoise brushstrokes — Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 — Self-Portrait (1889, Musée d'Orsay)
Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Nude nymphs link hands and dance in a ring around a blazing bonfire in a dark wood while Pan crouches at the left playing a pipe — Joseph Tomanek, Nymphs Dancing to Pan's Flute — Nymphs Dancing to Pan's Flute
Joseph Tomanek

A skull-faced figure clutches its face on a railed road beneath a swirling blood-red sky over a dark blue fjord — Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893 — The Scream
Edvard Munch · 1893

A dark naked winged figure crouches on a rock with his chin in his hand, his pale glowing eyes staring out of the shadows — Franz von Stuck, Lucifer, 1890 — Lucifer
Franz von Stuck · 1890

A three-panel painting moving from a calm green Eden through a crowded garden of naked figures and giant fruit to a dark, burning hell full of monsters — Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490–1510 — The Garden of Earthly Delights
Hieronymus Bosch · c. 1490–1510

A bare-breasted woman in a red cap raises the French tricolor and a musket over a barricade of bodies as armed Parisians follow her through the smoke — Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830 — Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix · 1830