Il caffè di notte

In the first days of September 1888, Van Gogh sat up for three nights in a row painting this room, sleeping through the days to recover. The place was the Café de la Gare in Arles, a shabby all-night bar near the train station run by a couple called the Ginoux, where the town's drifters and drunks slumped over their tables after everyone else had gone home. Van Gogh was blunt about what he was after. He wrote to his brother Theo that he had tried to show a café as a place where a man can ruin himself, go mad, or commit a crime, and that he did it with clashes of blood-red walls and a green ceiling and a green billiard table under harsh lamps. Those colours were the whole point for him. He believed red and green, pushed against each other this hard, could carry what he called the terrible passions of people. Notice the floor tilting up toward you and the halos of orange smeared around each gas lamp, as if the light itself were sweating. In the middle stands the patron in his pale coat, watching over the emptying room. Van Gogh paid his rent partly in paintings, and this one he swapped to settle what he owed the landlord.