Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum)

Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum)

Vincent van Gogh painted this work in Arles. He wanted to make a nocturnal painting, but this is a quite difficult task without natural light sources. He also wanted to paint the night without using black and grey tones, and instead use an abundance of colours. He was fascinated by the way the light behaves in different ways during the day and the night. Vincent wrote the following in a letter to his sister: "It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot". They used to draw and paint the picture in the daytime after the sketch. But I find satisfaction in painting the thing immediately.

Of course it's true that in the dark I may mistake a blue for a green, a blue-lilac for a pink-lilac, for you cannot distinguish the quality of a hue very well. But it is the only way to get rid of the conventional night scenes with their poor sallow whitish light, when even a simple candle gives us the richest yellows and orange tints. Terrace of a Café at Night is the ultimate example for the fact that Van Gogh was great at painting his surroundings accurately.

He even painted the constellations precisely as they appeared on the night of 16 or 17 September 1888. This is the first painting in which he portrays a starry sky. A year later, he painted his famous work; starry night.