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

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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)”.

"Lust for life" poster (1956)

"Vincent and the Doctor" poster (2010)

"Loving Vincent" poster (2017)

"Ronin" poster (1998)

This painting is currently at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.

Entrance to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

The café terrace, now 'Le Café La Nuit', at Place du Forum, Arles (2016)

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Interesting Art Stories: 7. The Starry 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 7th story for this week is "The Starry Night" by a Dutch post-impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh.

“The Starry Night” is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it describes the real view through the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an ideal village. It is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Self Portrait (1887)

After an incident that he mutilated his left ear on December 23, 1888, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. The asylum, a former monastery, was accommodating the wealthy, and when Van Gogh was hospitalized, it was less than half full, so he could use not only a second-floor bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as his painting studio.

The Monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole

During his stay at the asylum, Van Gogh painted some of his most famous works, including the “Irises” now in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the “self-portrait” in the Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted around June 18, the date he wrote to his brother Theo that he had a new painting of a starry sky. This work was painted in the studio on the ground floor used by Van Gogh during the day, but the claim that he drew this picture from memory is not an exact expression. This is because Van Gogh painted more than 21 times what he saw in his bedroom window, one of which was identified as “The Starry Night”.

Irises (May 1889)

Self portrait without beard (September 1889)

The hospital did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, but allowed sketching in ink or charcoal on paper, and in this situation he continued to create new versions based on previous versions. “The Starry Night” is the only nocturne work in the series of views what he saw in his bedroom window. In early June, Van Gogh wrote a letter to Theo: "This morning I saw the countryside from my window for a long time before sunrise with only the morning star remaining, which looked very big”. The brightest star in this picture, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is “Venus” that Van Gogh thought it was the 'morning star' and it was indeed visible at dawn in Provence at the time. At the time of 1889, it was confirmed by scholars that Venus was so close to Earth that it could be actually seen at dawn and was the brightest.

According to astronomical records, the moon was its waning crescent when Van Gogh painted this work, therefore the moon he drew in this painting is not astronomically correct and stylized. Also, the only thing in the picture that is not visible from his bedroom window is the village, which is known to be based on sketches drawn from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Also, the cypress tree depicted in the painting is a plant related to death, suggesting that only death can take us to the star.

Van Gogh has written a lot of letters, but he rarely mentioned this painting. After mentioning it in a letter saying that he drew a starry sky in June, Van Gogh included the painting in a list of paintings sending to his brother Theo in Paris, writing "the only things I consider a little good in the list are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me”. Among them, “The Starry Night” was included in “the rest”. In addition, Van Gogh first excluded three paintings from the list to save the postage, and The Starry Night was one of them he didn't send. As another example, in a letter to a painter and his friend Émile Bernard, Van Gogh referred to the painting as "failure." In other words, it can be interpreted as Van Gogh did not satisfy with the painting.

In addition, Van Gogh preferred working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to the latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles. The first painting in the series depicting the night is the “Café Terrace at Night” in Arles in early September 1888, and the next one is the “Starry Night Over the Rhône” in the same month.

Café Terrace at Night (1888)

Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888)

After Van Gogh and Theo died, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger became the legacy manager of Van Gogh. She sold the painting to poet Julien Leclercq in Paris in 1900, and he sold it back to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker in 1901, and then Johanna bought it again from Schuffenecker in 1906. 

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

It was later owned by Georgette P. van Stolk in Rotterdam from 1906 to 1938. Then, he sold it to Paul Rosenberg, and finally the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased it from Rosenberg in 1941, and the museum possesses this painting since then.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA

The scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York performed a pigment analysis of this painting. According to the results of the analysis, the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and the stars and the moon used the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.

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