The Café That Painted Itself Into the Stars

In mid-September 1888, on the northeastern corner of a small square in Arles called the Place du Forum, Vincent van Gogh set up his easel at night and began work on a painting he never signed. He called it, in his letters, simply a view of the café where he and his friends used to go. Today it is known as Café Terrace at Night, and it hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands — but that plain title barely hints at what he was attempting.

What he was attempting, in his own words to his sister Wil, was a painting of night without black. Van Gogh described a huge yellow lantern lighting the terrace, the façade of the café, and the pavement, which took on a violet-pink tinge under the glow. Above, the gables of the houses on the street leading away were dark blue or violet, with a green tree among them, and over it all stretched a sky studded with stars. He rendered the whole scene in blues, violets, greens, and the pale sulphur-lemon color of the lit square — a deliberate rejection of the conventional, murky black night.

He also described the practical thrill of it: painting directly on the spot at night, rather than sketching by day and filling in a night scene from memory, as was customary. He admitted the risk — that in the dark he might mistake a blue for a green, or a blue lilac for a pink lilac — but he considered this the only way to escape the pallid, whitish light that painters conventionally used to suggest darkness. A single candle, he noted, gives the richest yellows and oranges.

In that same letter to Wil, Van Gogh mentioned Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel-Ami, whose opening describes a starry night in Paris with lighted cafés along the boulevard — a scene he felt resembled the subject he had just painted. Van Gogh Museum curators have connected the painting to this passage, though they note Maupassant's text makes no mention of a starry sky, a detail that appears to be Van Gogh's own addition.

Other scholars have looked for different inspirations. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, in 1981, suggested the painting's funnel-like perspective and dominant blue-yellow tonality owed something to Louis Anquetin's Avenue de Clichy: 5 o'clock in the evening. A more speculative theory, presented at an academic conference in 2013, proposed that Van Gogh secretly intended the composition as a Symbolist reimagining of the Last Supper — pointing to his purchase of a dozen straw-bottomed chairs, his related restaurant interior studies, and a letter to his brother Theo written two weeks later in which he confessed a terrible need for religion and a recurring dream of painting a group of living figures, his 'pals.' Van Gogh never stated this intent outright in any surviving letter.