About Café Terrace at Night Painted in 1888 while Van Gogh was staying in Arles, this work depicts the Place du Forum. This is the first painting in which he used starry backgrounds; he went on to paint star-filled skies in Starry Night Over the Rhône (painted the same month), and the better known The Starry Night a year later.
In a letter to his sister, Van Gogh wrote:
“Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square is colored pale sulphur, lemon green. I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night. In the past they used to draw, and paint the picture from the drawing in the daytime. But I find that it suits me to paint the thing straightaway.”
The painting now resides at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.
Van Gogh was a master painter who strongly influenced the abstract and Neo-expressionist who came after him. Originating from the Netherlands, he discovered Impressionist art while living in Paris and started to use the color and light. His work is well known for its beauty, emotion, and color, as well as its interesting viewpoints of mundane objects.
Despite being extremely poor and generally unknown throughout his lifetime, Van Gogh is now one of the greatest Dutch painters. He lived a life with emotional tension and madness, and he created his finest piece, Starry Night, inside an institution.
Although the specter of mental illness haunted him throughout his adult life and created a habit of inflicting self-harm (such as the infamous severed ear), his work remained a testament to his genius. Van Gogh died at the age of only 37, due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His brother Theo would go on to distribute his work and cultivate his popularity.
