Cafe Terrace

Vincent Van Gogh has produced all of his works, which included 864 paintings and 1,200 drawings and prints, within a decade.

Van Gogh has done most of his paintings outdoors and had a special talent for capturing the subtleties of nighttime light and shadow. Van Gogh suffered from lifelong bouts with mental illness yet created many of his famous paintings while institutionalized. Café Terrace is done with high-quality art print process and produces the vivid color and exceptional detail of the original. Café Terrace doesn't match with the other paintings of Van Gogh as he mostly worked on the natural compositions like wheat field landscapes, flowers etc.

This fine art exhibits Van Gogh's own sadness. After having done many compositions with night scenes, Vincent van Gogh became fascinated with the starts and the light effects of the night. He successfully depicted the effects of luminosity with the use of contrasting colors and tones. The dark brown colors compliment the lights, the blue color of the sky intensifies the oranges, and the purples bring out the yellows.

Van Gogh, in a letter to his sister, wrote about the Cafe Terrace at Night: "Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colors itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. 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 with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges." The café is still there and is a popular destination for those following the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh.