An interesting curiosity surrounds a
19th century café in Arles, France because it appeared in oil paintings by two
icons of European art.
Both Vincent
Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin depicted the interior of Café de la Gare (then at 30
Place Lamartine) in the French town near the river Rhone. Sadly, the café exists no more.
“Le Café de
Nuit” is considered a masterpiece by latter day art critics. Dutch artist Van
Gogh and was painted in September 1888.
Its title is inscribed beneath his signature. In Van Gogh’s work the man standing is café
owner Joseph Ginoux. Reportedly, the
artist painted the pictures in partial payment for his bar tabs.
Again,
reportedly the owner wanted to show off his newly installed gas ceiling lamps.
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 downward.
The rest of
the painting shows the interior of the cafe, with a half-curtained doorway in
the center background leading, presumably, to more private quarters. Five
customers depicted in the scene have been described as "three drunks and
derelicts.”
Another art
writer says "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."
Van Gogh in
a letter to his brother Theo describes his work as it was in progress: “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...”
Present
location: Yale University.
GAUGUIN’S VERSION.
The same café in Arles was the
background for a portrait of Madame Marie Ginoux, wife of the owner. It was painted in November, 1888 after Van
Gogh urged his friend and fellow painter to come to Provence to assist him in
forming an artist’s colony there. But by
the end of the year Van Gogh’s erratic behavior (self ear slashing) Gauguin
left Arles and Van Gogh to his devils.
The two friends never saw each other again.
Because the
figures in both paintings are similar that fact has led many to believe Gauguin
was assisting Van Gogh to pay off debts at the café. Other art scholars disagree pointing to
letters from Van Gogh to his brother that Gauguin was painting images that he
had already painted. Van Gogh seemed
miffed.
Gauguin
reportedly reworked “Night Café at Arles” the piece described here but in the
end the characters are the same as in Van Gogh’s earlier work.
Present
location: Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
.
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