Café Terrace at Night

Café Terrace at Night is among the most technically innovative works of Van Gogh's Arles period: painted directly on the Place du Forum in September 1888, working by gaslight on three successive nights, it was one of the first paintings in the European tradition to represent an outdoor night scene without the use of black paint. He described the challenge to Theo with precise colour thinking — 'the sky is a deep blue, the ground is violet, the lighted terrace yellow-orange' — and the resulting complementary contrast of deep cobalt against brilliant yellow achieved an intensity impossible in daylight painting. He was reading Daudet's Provençal novels and absorbing the specific character of southern French nocturnal social life; the terrace with its tables and shadowed figures was both a direct observation and an image saturated with the particular warmth and sociability he found in the south after the isolated winters of the north. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo holds this iconic work.

Cobalt blue and prussian blue dominate the street and sky, set against cadmium yellow in the lighted terrace. Stars are rendered as impasto spikes of white and pale yellow. The perspective is steep, pulling the viewer into the space. Brushwork varies from short dabs in the sky to longer strokes on the paving stones.