The Night caf&eacute at Arles

(original French title: Le Café de nuit) is an oil painting created by Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) in Arles in September 1888 and categorized as one of the most famous of Van Gogh's composition. In the Night Café, Van Gogh depicted the interior of the Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel and his wife Marie Ginoux. Later, both Joseph and Marie Ginoux posed for Van Gogh. Van Gogh has done this painting on industrial primed canvas of size 30. It exhibits the interior of the cafe, with a half-curtained doorway in the center background leading, presumably, to more private quarters. It also displays the customers sitting at tables along the walls, and a waiter in a light coat, to one side of a pool table near the center of the room. The Night Café exhibits wildly contrasting, vivid colours with the green ceiling, the red upper walls, the glowing gas ceiling lamps and floor largely yellow. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, 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" staying open all night. He described the painting to his brother in a letter saying,"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green." He also wrote: "It is color not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist, but color to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament." Althoug Night Café caught significant attention and a more striking van Gogh canvas would be difficult to find besides this, the painting  cannot be called beautiful as Van Gogh‘s intention was to show the lowest edge of humanity, without adornment, with as much impact and sincerity as possible.