Night Cafe (1888). Oil on canvas. 72 x 92. The Night Café is an oil painting created by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in September 1888 in Arles. 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. 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, with Ginoux, the landlord said to be depicted in it, to one side of a billiard table near the center of the room, 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. 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. 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. 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, 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. In the first days of September 1888, Van Gogh sat up for three consecutive nights to paint the picture, sleeping during the day. Little later, he sent the water-colour, copying the composition and again simplifying 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 wrote many letters to his brother, Theo van Gogh, and often included details of his latest work. The artist wrote his brother more than once about The Night Café. According to Meyer Schapiro, there are few works on which has written with more conviction. In one of the letters he describes this painting: 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. The next day, he wrote Theo: In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin. 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. The violent exaggeration of the colours and the thick texture of the paint made the picture one of the ugliest pictures I have done, Van Gogh wrote at one point. He also called it the equivalent, though different, of The Potato Eaters, which it resembles somewhat in its use of lamplight and concerns for the condition of people in need. Soon after its execution, Van Gogh incorporated this painting into his Décoration for the Yellow House.