The Night Café is the painting Van Gogh called "one of the ugliest" he had ever made. He meant it as praise. Here is why he wanted it to feel horrible.

In September 1888, Vincent van Gogh was renting a room above the Café de la Gare in Arles, an all-night café where drinkers and drifters slept at the tables. After an argument over rent, he told the owner, Joseph Ginoux, that he would paint "his whole filthy old place" to get his money back.

He stayed up three nights to do it. In his letters to his brother Theo he explained exactly what he was after: "the terrible human passions" in clashing red and green, a room where "you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes." The Night Café was meant to feel horrible.

But Van Gogh was proud of it. He compared it to The Potato Eaters, wrote its title on the canvas, and defended the people in it: "my night café isn't a brothel." Weeks later, Paul Gauguin painted the same café and told a very different story. And when Van Gogh left Arles for the asylum at Saint-Rémy, the landlord he had painted as a furnace of ruin kept his furniture.

00:00 A painting meant to feel horrible
00:25 The Café de la Gare, Arles 1888
01:15 Revenge on the landlord
02:20 Three nights awake in the Night Café
03:16 Red against green: "the terrible human passions"
04:55 "One of the ugliest I've done"
05:54 Not a brothel: Gauguin's Night Café
06:48 The landlord kept everything
07:26 From Moscow to Yale
08:00 So why did Van Gogh want it horrible?

Sources:
Van Gogh's letters to Theo, 6 August, 8 and 9 September 1888; letters to Émile Bernard, c. 5 October and 1-2 November 1888 (vangoghletters.org)
The Night Café (Le café de nuit), 1888, Yale University Art Gallery
Paul Gauguin, Night Café at Arles (Madame Ginoux), 1888, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
The Potato Eaters, 1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
All artworks and letters shown are in the public domain.

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