阿尔勒的餐厅内景

Van Gogh painted this empty restaurant room in Arles in the late summer of 1888, and it shows him testing something he had picked up in Paris the year before. There he had met the younger painters building pictures out of small dots of pure colour, and here he tries it, the walls and floor stippled with flecks. But he could not hold to the method. The tables and chairs he lays down in long, impatient strokes instead, and shades them the old way. The colours are set in deliberate opposites, red against green on the walls, yellow against violet on the floor. It was that autumn, not long before Gauguin came to live with him. The room is spotless and completely empty of people.