Interior of a restaurant

In the summer of 1887 Van Gogh was trying on a technique that was new in Paris. The painter Georges Seurat and his circle had begun building pictures out of small separate dots of pure colour, letting the viewer's eye do the mixing, and this restaurant interior is about as far as Van Gogh ever carried that idea. Look at the walls and the floor and you can see the stippling. He could not quite obey the rule, though, so the tables and chairs are laid in with long strokes instead of dots, and he shades them the old way to suggest depth. The room is set for lunch, white cloths and little bouquets on each table like tiny still lifes, and up in one corner a black hat hangs on the wall, a sign that a customer is about to sit down. He kept the complementary pairs ringing against each other, red against green on the walls, yellow against violet on the floor.