Van Gogh painted this glowing café scene at night, working outdoors under real gas lamps rather than guessing at the colors from memory the next day.
What you're looking at
Painted in Arles, France in September 1888, Café Terrace at Night shows an outdoor café lit by a warm yellow gas lamp, its light spilling onto the cobblestones, set against a deep blue sky scattered with stars. It's one of Van Gogh's first paintings to include a starry night sky, a subject he'd return to again the following year.
Painted without a single stroke of black
Van Gogh was fascinated by how colors actually looked at night rather than how convention said a night scene should look, and he built every shadow in the picture from deep blues and greens rather than plain black. Working outside after dark, by real lamplight, let him study exactly how gaslight warms a stone wall or a cobblestone street compared to the cool blues of a night sky.
The café itself was a real, specific place in Arles, on the Place du Forum near the town's old Roman forum. The site was restored in the 1990s to resemble the painting and remains one of the city's best-known photo stops for that reason, though the café operating there has closed on and off in recent years, so it isn't reliably open for visitors.
One detail to look for
Look at the very top of the painting, where the deep blue sky meets the buildings. Van Gogh scattered the stars unevenly and made some noticeably larger and brighter than others, closer to how stars actually look to the eye than to a tidy, symmetrical night sky.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, held at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, so what you hang is honestly scaled, not a guess. Shop the canvas print.