Café Terrace at Night

Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh

Café Terrace at Night is the first artwork in the well-known Starry Night trilogy of 1888 to 1889 by Vincent van Gogh. The oil painting was painted in Arles, France during the first two weeks of September 1888. The painting and finished on the 16th, 1888.

The subject of Van Goghs night painting Cafe Terrace at Night is a starry sky at night, a yellow house at the Place du Forum.
The artwork was never signed by the artist, but art historians proved his authorship based on his letters in which he mentioned the piece three times.
The canvas has had two other names: Café, le soir, (Coffeehouse in the Evening), and The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum. It was listed at the first public exhibition in 1891 after van Gogh’s death.

The brightness of the night sky and the night effects were rendered by the master by means of the complementary technique. Contrasting colors of dark blue, warm yellow, and orange in this particular case. Van Gogh was mostly painting on the spot while creating his famous artworks and oil paintings.

Fascinated by night and its colorful depth, van Gogh believed in the richness of night hues and achieved the radiance of paints in his masterpiece by avoiding black – the color of darkness and dullness. Light and night are the queens and the kings in this night painting. Like in Starry Night, his last work in the trilogy, the celestial positions in the sky of the painting are accurate, according to astronomical data.

The original café was renovated at the beginning of the 1990s to replicate the painting and keeps attracting admirers of Van Gogh’s talent from all over the world.

Café Terrace at night current home is the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.

Buy an oil painting reproduction of Van Goghs Cafe Terrace at Night – Hand-painted in oil on canvas!