The Night Café in Arles

The Night Café in Arles (Mme Ginoux, 1888) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is Gauguin's version of the café interior subject that Van Gogh also painted in the famous Night Café at Yale. The two artists approached the same subject at the same time in Arles with completely different formal and emotional intentions: Van Gogh's Night Café was suffused with expressionist anxiety, its jarring color relationships deliberately used to convey tension and unease; Gauguin's version was cooler, more decorative, more compositionally controlled. Madame Ginoux, the owner of the Café de la Gare, is depicted at the foreground table alongside figures in the background, the whole organized with Gauguin's characteristic flat color areas and firm contours rather than Van Gogh's charged, dynamic brushwork. The Pushkin's possession of this canvas places it alongside several other major second-Tahitian-stay Gauguins in the collection, providing Moscow with documentation of both his Arles period and his mature Polynesian production.

Gauguin organizes the café interior with greater spatial coherence than Van Gogh's version, using a more conventional recession into the room's depth while employing flat color areas and simplified forms rather than Impressionist facture. Madame Ginoux's figure at right is painted with bold, simplified strokes that emphasize mass and silhouette.