Terrace of a Cafe on Montmartre (La Guinguette)

Terrace of a Cafe on Montmartre (La Guinguette), painted in October 1886 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, depicts an outdoor café — a guinguette, or popular dancing place — on the slopes of Montmartre during Van Gogh's Paris period. The guinguette tradition — outdoor cafes providing cheap food, wine, and dancing — was associated with the working-class and lower bourgeois Parisian leisure culture that the Impressionists had begun to document seriously. Van Gogh was absorbing this tradition directly during his Paris years, and this work shows him finding his footing in a subject — the outdoor social space of modern Paris — that Renoir and Manet had made their own.

The outdoor café setting allows Van Gogh to study the play of light and shadow in a dappled, leafy environment — the tables, chairs, and scattered figures caught in the fragmented light of an autumn afternoon. His Paris-period technique shows the influence of Impressionism most strongly here: the paint is applied with broken brushwork appropriate to the dancing light. The palette is autumnal — warm yellows, russet browns, the particular quality of October afternoon light in Paris. Figures are handled with sketch-like efficiency.