Cafe Terrace au Place du Forum

This work by van Gogh, also called Cafe at Night, is one of his most recognizable. It depicts a night time setting, in Arles, in the south of France.



It’s a place that still stands, just as it looks in the artwork, and every year many fans of van Gogh take a trip and visit the area, to see the real setting that inspired the masterpiece and stand at the exact angle van Gogh would have set up his easel and canvas.

That yellow light

The work is famous for being the first starry night van Gogh ever painted, Starry Night, for example, was still a year away. It is also interesting for van Gogh’s choice of not using black at all to depict night:

‘Here you have a nocturnal scene without any black, only beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur yellow, greenish, citron yellow color’, Van Gogh wrote to his sister, Wil.

With the warm yellow tones emanating from the gas lamp, the work has a very special feeling. It again has this way of linking the environment, emotion, and those within it – a oneness.

The colors and the atmosphere give you that warm feeling of a summers night where you feel free to sit or wander, and the sky above, much like the ground below support you in everything you do and feel.

Van Gogh colors the night

In typical Van Gogh style he did not go about the painting in the usual approach of the times. Again writing to his sister, Van Gogh notes: “Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch.

But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night…”

Buy your own Cafe Terrace au Place du Forum

I’m sure like millions of others, you are also glad Van Gogh experimented with his approach and his use of color to create another masterpiece. Order your very own Cafe Terrace au Place du Forum reproduction here.