The Night Cafe

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The Night Cafe: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - The Night Cafe

Keywords: Night, Cafe

Work Overview: The Night Café
French: Le Café de nuit
Artist Vincent van Gogh
Year 1888
Catalogue F463
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 72.4 cm × 92.1 cm (28.5 in × 36.3 in)
Location Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

The Night Café (French: Le Café de nuit) is an oil painting created by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in September 1888 in Arles.[1] Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature. The painting is owned by Yale University and is currently held at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.

The interior depicted is the Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie, who in November 1888 posed for Van Gogh's and Gauguin's Arlésienne; a bit later, Joseph Ginoux evidently posed for both artists, too.

The painting was executed on industrial primed canvas of size 30 (French standard). It depicts the interior of the cafe, with a half-curtained doorway in the center background leading, presumably, to more private quarters. Five customers sit at tables along the walls to the left and right, and a waiter in a light coat, to one side of a billiard table near the center of the room, stands facing the viewer.

The five customers depicted in the scene have been described as "three drunks and derelicts in a large public room [...] huddled down in sleep or stupor."[2] One scholar wrote, "The cafe was an all-night haunt of local down-and-outs and prostitutes, who are depicted slouched at tables and drinking together at the far end of the room.".[3]

In wildly contrasting, vivid colours, the ceiling is green, the upper walls red, the glowing, gas ceiling lamps and floor largely yellow. The paint is applied thickly, with many of the lines of the room leading toward the door in the back. The perspective looks somewhat downward toward the floor.

In a jocular passage of a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, the artist said Ginoux had taken so much of his money that he'd told the cafe owner it was time to take his revenge by painting the place.[2]

In August 1888 the artist told his brother in a letter:

“ Today I am probably going to begin on the interior of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening. It is what they call here a “café de nuit” (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night. “Night prowlers” can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in.[4] ”
In the first days of September 1888, Van Gogh sat up for three consecutive nights to paint the picture, sleeping during the day.[5] Little later, he sent the water-colour, copying the composition and again simplyfing the colour scheme on order to meet the simplicity of Japanese woodblock prints.

Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night, showing outdoor tables, a street scene and the night sky, was painted in Arles at about the same time. It depicts a different cafe, a larger establishment on the Place du Forum.

Van Gogh used the picture to settle debts with Ginoux, the landlord said to be depicted (standing) in it.[3] Formerly a highlight of the Ivan Morozov collection in Moscow, the painting was nationalized and sold by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s. The painting was eventually acquired by Stephen Carlton Clark, who bequeathed it to the art gallery of Yale University.

On March 24, 2009, Yale sued Pierre Konowaloff, Morozov's purported great-grandson, to maintain the university's title to the work. Konowaloff had allegedly asserted a claim to own the painting on the grounds that the Soviets had invalidly nationalized it.[14] Yale dropped its lawsuit in October of that year, in a motion which stated “it is well-established that a foreign nation’s taking of its own national’s property within its own borders does not violate international law,” claiming both the Soviet and Yale acquisitions of the painting to therefore be legal.[15]

On March 27, 2016 the United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Konowaloff regarding the case [1], siding with a federal appeals court in New York cited the “act of state” doctrine. The rejection means Yale's ownership is absolute.

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The Supreme Court has ruled that Vincent van Gogh‘s Le café de nuit (The Night Café), worth an estimated $200 million, will remain in the US at Yale University Art Gallery, reports Agence France-Presse. The heir of the original owner, Russian industrialist Ivan Morozov, has been fighting since 2008 to reclaim the painting, which was purchased in 1908, and seized in 1918, after the Bolshevik Party took power.

Up to this point, Morozov, who frequently traveled to Paris to buy art, had one of the world’s premiere art collections, featuring Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and many others. But following the October Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin singled out Morozov’s collection for nationalization, and the state displayed the seized works in the Second Museum of Modern Western Painting.

The Soviet government sold the painting to a Berlin’s Matthiesen Gallery in 1933, and the canvas made its way to New York’s Knoedler & Company. There, it was purchased by Stephen Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune, who bequeathed it to Yale when he died in 1961.

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In a letter to his brother written from Arles in the south of France, van Gogh described the Café de l’Alcazar, where he took his meals, as “blood red and dull yellow with a green billiard table in the center, four lemon yellow lamps with an orange and green glow. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens.” The clashing colors were also meant to express the “terrible passions of humanity” found in this all-night haunt, populated by vagrants and prostitutes. Van Gogh also felt that colors took on an intriguing quality at night, especially by gaslight: in this painting, he wanted to show how “the white clothing of the café owner, keeping watch in a corner of this furnace, becomes lemon yellow, pale and luminous green.”

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