Art Collage JANG: Interesting Art Stories: 24. Café Terrace at Night, Vincent van Gogh, ACJ Art Academy

How are you?

On every Thursday, I am introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the title “Interesting Art Stories”.

The 24th story for this week is “Café Terrace at Night” by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. “Café Terrace at Night” is an oil painting by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in 1888. This painting is also known as "The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum", and when it was first exhibited in 1891, it was entitled “Coffeehouse, in the evening (Café, le soir).”

Vincent van Gogh

After finishing this painting, Van Gogh wrote a letter to his sister, saying:

“In the evenings of these past few days, I've been addicted to a new painting of the outside of a cafe. The café's huge yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the façade and the pavement, and even over the cobblestones of the street. Now I have a painting of night without black. There are only beautiful blue, violet and green in this painting. And in these surroundings the lighted square is colored itself pale sulphur, lemon green. I love to paint at that place at night. In the past, I used to paint the picture from the drawing in the daytime, but I found that it suits me to paint the thing straightaway. I don't know if you've read Maupassant’s “Bel-ami” but I'd say that the beginning of Bel-ami portrays a starry night in Paris with the lighted cafes of the boulevard, and it is something like same theme as the painting I just finished.”

Preparatory study for the painting (1888)

This letter supports Van Gogh Museum's curator's claim that this painting depicted the content from Maupassant's novel Bel Ami but Maupassant did not specifically mentioned "starry sky" in the novel.

Guy de Maupassant

Van Gogh Museum

In 1981, Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, an art historian at the University of Toronto and an expert of Vincent Van Gogh, argued that since this painting displays not only a night scene, but also a funnel-like perspective and dominant blue-yellow tonality" it was at least partially inspired by Louis Anquetin's “Avenue de Clichy: 5 o'clock in the evening.”

Avenue de Clichy, 5 o'clock in the evening, Louis Anquetin (1887)

In addition, the paper presented at the 2013 conference held by The International Academic Forum argued that this painting depicted "Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci. For the basis of these arguments, Van Gogh, the son of a protestant minister, was a very religious person who devoted himself to and imitated Jesus Christ throughout his life. For this reason, many art critics believe that many of Van Gogh's signature paintings show the relationship between art and Christian imagery.

The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1492–1498)

The examples are Van Gogh’s two Last Supper studies such as “Interior of a Restaurant in Arles” and “Interior of the Restaurant Carrel in Arles” hoping to start a commune of twelve "artist-apostles" at his Yellow House. Especially, the "Café Terrace at Night" offers the best example of this theory, with the claim that the painting is a description of Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper".

Interior of a Restaurant in Arles (1888)

Interior of the Restaurant Carrel in Arles (1888)

The Yellow House (1888)

“Café Terrace at Night” is the first painting in which van Gogh used starry backgrounds. On the same month, he continued to paint a star-filled skies in "Starry Night Over the Rhône" and a year later painted the more famous painting "The Starry Night". Van Gogh also painted a starlight background in "Portrait of Eugène Boch.” He mentioned the Cafe Terrace painting in a letter to Eugène Boch on October 2, 1888, "I painted a view of the cafe on place du Forum, where we used to go, at night."

Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888)

The Starry Night (1889)

Portrait of Eugène Boch (1888)

The painting and the café were both appeared in the 1956 film "Lust for Life" starring Kirk Douglas, followed by "Vincent and the Doctor (2010)”, the tenth episode in the fifth series of British science fiction TV series "Doctor Who”, and also appeared in the animated film “Loving Vincent (2017)”, and the cafe in the painting also appeared in the film “Ronin (1998)”.