Relationships
Vincent van Gogh
The Night Café
1888
Oil on canvas, 72.4 × 92.1 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Blood-red walls press against a green ceiling, and green tables and a pale green bar stand out against the red. Here the opposites are meant to grate, not to please.
- Writing to his brother Theo, he said he had tried to show the terrible passions of humanity with red and green.
- A day later his letter broke the green into several kinds, from soft malachite tones to harsh blue-greens and yellow-greens.
- Saturated yellow, thick on the floor and set in dashes around the lamps, adds a third note; he likened the air to a furnace of pale sulfur.
He called it one of the ugliest pictures he had made. The clash was deliberate: the café was to feel like a place where people ruin themselves.
Concepts
Image: Yale University Art Gallery (IIIF, marked public domain) · Public domain