The Night Café in Arles

The Night Café in Arles at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts depicts the café at the Place Lamartine that Gauguin painted in November 1888 — the same subject Van Gogh had painted from a different angle earlier that autumn. Where Van Gogh's version expresses anguish and alienation through distorted perspective and clashing colors, Gauguin's is cooler and more detached, with figures in the foreground rendered in the flat, simplified style of his developing Synthetism. Madame Ginoux, the café owner who sat for both artists, appears prominently at the right — her image thus existing in two radically different artistic visions.

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.