Cafe Terrace at Night: Location, Meaning, Not Starry Night
Cafe Terrace at Night is an 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh, in the Kroller Muller Museum in the Netherlands. It shows a yellow lit cafe terrace under a sky full of stars, on the Place du Forum in Arles.
It is Van Gogh's first painting of a starry sky, made a full year before The Starry Night.
The cafe is still there, and you can stand where Van Gogh set up his easel. Here is where it is, why it is not The Starry Night, and the strange theory that it hides a Last Supper.
Where the cafe really is
This is a real place. Van Gogh painted it in September 1888, on the Place du Forum in the southern French town of Arles, standing in the open square at night with his canvas.
The setting is not invented, which is why people search for the location so often.
The cafe is still open today, on the same corner of the same square, now renamed the Cafe Van Gogh in his honor, its front repainted the same yellow to match the picture.
Tourists sit at those tables every evening. Few paintings let you occupy the exact spot the artist stood, and this is one of them.
A night with no black in it
Van Gogh set himself a challenge here, and he was thrilled by it. He wrote to his sister that he had painted a night scene without using any black at all, only beautiful blue and violet and green, with the lit square a pale sulphur and citron yellow.
Look and it is true. The darkness of the sky is deep blue, not black; the shadows are colored. The glowing terrace throws warm yellow light across the cobbles, and the stars are dabbed on like little flowers.
He was learning to build the feeling of night out of pure color, the discovery that would explode a year later into the swirling sky of The Starry Night.
It is not The Starry Night
This is the single most common confusion, so let us settle it. Cafe Terrace at Night and The Starry Night are two different paintings. This one, the cafe, came first, in Arles in 1888, and lives in the Kroller Muller Museum in the Netherlands.
The Starry Night, the famous swirling one, was painted the following year, in 1889, from the window of an asylum, and hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
They are often mixed up because both are Van Gogh night scenes with big stars, but they are a year and a country apart.
The hidden Last Supper theory
Here is the idea that keeps people staring at it. Some writers have argued that Van Gogh, the son of a pastor, hid a version of the Last Supper inside this cafe scene.
They count the figures on the terrace and find a central long haired man in white, roughly where Christ sits in a Last Supper, surrounded by about twelve others, with the window frame behind him forming a faint cross.
It is a reading, not a proven fact, and I would treat it as exactly that. Van Gogh never mentioned any such plan in his many letters about the painting.
But he had once trained for the church and struggled with faith all his life, so the theory is at least the kind of thing he might have felt, even if he never spelled it out.
Take it as a suggestion to look harder, not as gospel.
Where the cafe painting lives
Cafe Terrace at Night is in the Kroller Muller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands, home to the second largest collection of Van Goghs in the world after the Amsterdam museum.
It is not for sale and carries no auction price. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime and could not have imagined the value now placed on a Post Impressionist night he dashed off in a square in Arles.
The three nights of Arles
Cafe Terrace at Night belongs to a burst of night pictures Van Gogh painted in Arles in September 1888, each testing a different idea.
This one is the warm, public, welcoming night. Around the same weeks he painted Starry Night over the Rhone, where the town lights double in black water, and The Night Cafe, a blood red room he said was a place where a man could ruin himself.
Read together they are an argument about darkness. The famous swirling Starry Night came about nine months later, from an asylum window.
In Arles he was still out in the open, chasing the real night of a real town, and the terrace is the happiest of the set.
Painting the dark from life
He did not work this up from memory in daylight. Van Gogh set his easel out in the Place du Forum and painted the scene on the spot, at night, working by the light of the gas lamps and the lit cafe itself.
He wrote to his sister that he found the night far richer in color than the day, full of blue, violet and green, and that he had a terrible need, almost a religious one, to go out and paint the stars.
The result is a canvas built without a single touch of black, which was the challenge he set himself. Every shadow is colored. The night is made of everything except the one color we expect night to be.
The colony that never came
He painted it in the happiest stretch of his short life. Newly arrived in Arles, he had rented the Yellow House and was dreaming of a colony of artists who would live and paint together, with Paul Gauguin as its head.
Cafe Terrace was made in the weeks of that hope, before Gauguin arrived, before the two men fell out, and before the December night that cost Van Gogh his ear.
The stars in it were painted by a man who still thought the best was coming.
Cafe Terrace at Night, quick answers
Where is the cafe in Cafe Terrace at Night? The Place du Forum in Arles, southern France. The cafe still stands, now called the Cafe Van Gogh, painted yellow to match.
Is Cafe Terrace at Night the same as The Starry Night? No. This is the cafe, painted in Arles in 1888, in the Kroller Muller Museum. The Starry Night was painted in 1889 and is at MoMA in New York.
Who painted it and when? Vincent van Gogh, in September 1888. It is his first painting of a starry sky.
Does it hide a Last Supper? Some writers think so, seeing a central figure and twelve others. It is an unproven theory. Van Gogh never mentioned it.
Where is Cafe Terrace at Night? The Kroller Muller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands.
If this painting pulled you in, you will love these too:
The secret behind Hopper Soir Bleu, the clown picture that went wrong
The Last Supper, detail by detail, the detail hiding at that table
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, what is actually on those scales
The stars he painted before he was famous
Van Gogh made this in the happiest stretch of his short life, newly arrived in Arles, dreaming of an artists' colony in the Yellow House, months before the crisis that cost him his ear.
He never signed it and never sold it. The little yellow terrace where he first tried to paint the night became the rehearsal for the most famous night sky in the world, and he had no idea either one would outlast him.
You can see Cafe Terrace at Night in person at the Kroller Muller Museum. For more by the artist, browse the Metropolitan Museum collection.
What people ask about the terrace
Where is the scene? The Place du Forum in Arles, in the south of France. The cafe still stands there today.
Did Van Gogh use black for the night? No. He built the whole night sky from deep blues and glowing yellows, with no black at all, which is why the scene feels so alive after dark.
Is there a hidden Last Supper in it? A modern theory reads a central long haired figure among twelve others as a nod to the Last Supper. It is a suggestion, not a proven intention.
Where is the painting? It hangs in the Kroller Muller Museum in the Netherlands.
Who painted it? Vincent van Gogh, in 1888, a key work of Post Impressionism.