Close Menu
Finance Pro
  • Home
  • Art Gallery
  • Art Investment
  • Art Stocks
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Finance
  • Investing in Art
  • Investments
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
Trending
  • Leading by example: EBL’s bold push into sustainable finance
  • AP’s Tourism Receives Major Boost With ₹12,000 Crore Investments
  • Fraudsters convince victim to put $15,000 into cryptocurrency ATM: Westlake Police Blotter
  • Clacton Arts Centre gallery to celebrate first anniversary
  • Alibaba AI investments start to yield tangible returns for cloud business
  • Tamil Nadu CM Stalin embarks on trip to Germany, UK to attract investments | Latest News India
  • Real Estate for Cryptocurrency in 2025: Where and how to buy
  • MoU inked for investments in decarbonising technologies | Latest News India
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Get In Touch
Finance ProFinance Pro
  • Home
  • Art Gallery
  • Art Investment
  • Art Stocks
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Finance
  • Investing in Art
  • Investments
Finance Pro
Home»Art Gallery»Hope in the sinful world of Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Cafe’
Art Gallery

Hope in the sinful world of Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Cafe’

March 30, 20245 Mins Read


Van Gogh called it “one of the ugliest pictures I have done,” so why do I find ‘The Night Cafe’ so deeply hopeful and perfect for Easter?

Please consider a gift for Aleteia!
Help us spread the joy of Christ’s victory.
Aleteia depends on your support.

Join our Lenten Campaign 2024.

DONATE NOW

Vincent van Gogh painted The Night Cafe in Arles, France, in September 1888. He’d taken a house there to paint the sun and flowers, and many of his iconic paintings come from his time there in rural southern France. He came for the light and the natural beauty, which is why it’s ironic that he also made The Night Cafe while there, a painting that Van Gogh himself calls, “One of the ugliest pictures I have done.”

The colors in the cafe (which, to be fair, are entirely made up by Van Gogh and aren’t actually how the place looked) are nasty and pallid. The artist seems to be dazed, looking down at the floor. The floorboards tilt up and race towards a door in the rear. The interior looks as if, if it were a person, it’s physically ill. The people inside look sick, or perhaps they’ve drowned their sorrows with one too many drinks.

Painting and struggling

You can almost empathize with Van Gogh himself feeling ill as he paints the scene. He admits that it appears he painted while suffering, “a full-blown case of delirium tremens.” He knows that, in spite of his lovely surroundings and productivity with painting while in Arles, he’s struggling more and more intensely with psychological issues.

The suffering at times is too much, and it’s around this time that he has an episode and cuts off a piece of his own ear. He quarrels with his artist friend Paul Gauguin who was staying in Arles with him (and painted his own version of the cafe). Gauguin couldn’t bear to be near Van Gogh anymore and soon fled. The two never spoke again.

Van Gogh doesn’t know how to fix himself. So, he stays up late into the night and paints. It’s all he can think to do. The amazing thing is, the more he suffers, the more beautiful his paintings become, the more they reveal that which only the genius of art can reveal. His skies are streaked with eternity. His flowers are blazing stars. His stars are new-born flowers. But every once in a while, in between the paintings of glittering gold fields of wheat and dark cypresses waving in midnight wind, there’s an outlier, something like The Night Cafe.

Beauty in dirty cafes

When I was a student, I used to stop by the Yale Art Museum between classes and look at The Night Cafe. It was my favorite painting in the entire museum. Somehow, it evinces deep beauty and hope. I always wondered why.

Perhaps it’s because personal suffering taught Van Gogh a lesson that only suffering can teach — that there’s beauty there, too. There’s beauty in sunflowers and there’s beauty in dirty cafes at midnight. There’s beauty in the stripping away of human comfort and finding ourselves at the very bottom from whence we can only look up. This isn’t to say that we ought to desire to suffer as Van Gogh did, or that it wasn’t a terrible, unfair cross for him to have to bear, but it’s simply a way of saying that if we have the eyes to see, every Good Friday has Easter morning.

Color and light in the night

Van Gogh sees it. In a letter to his brother Theo, he says, “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day. (…) The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously.” In other words, the night isn’t simply the absence of day; it’s full of color. The light is here, too.

He goes on to tell his brother:

In my painting of the night café, I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes. Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink and blood-red and wine-red. Soft Louis XV and Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens and hard blue greens. All of that in an ambience of a hellish furnace, in pale sulfur.

He isn’t romanticizing the scene or pretending that nothing is wrong.

A waiting place

But here’s why I wanted to write about this painting specifically at Easter. As I’ve looked at it over the years, I’ve wondered what is this cafe, really? It’s a waiting place. Van Gogh tells his brother, “Night prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in.” For those who have nowhere else to go, the cafe is open. They can come in and get warm. They can even fall asleep. The people inside the cafe are insensible and suffering, but they are not ejected from the space.

It’s a metaphor for sin. Spiritually, when we give in to our flaws and vices we become oppressed. We are powerless to arise. But even there in that dark place, the night cafe, we are given respite. Even in this place, there is light.

Do you remember how the floor slopes to the open door in the rear of the cafe? The whole architecture of the place is pointing to the exit. Past the wan yellow lamplight, the scent of flowers makes itself known even in this artificial atmosphere, beckoning the viewer to step through that open door, brightly lit with a particular shade of yellow that Van Gogh loves so much, the yellow that mimics the color his little yellow house in the countryside.

Just outside the door, we know it’s currently nighttime, but soon enough the door will open onto a glorious sunrise, fields of golden wheat, and those sunflowers that lift their faces to the sky in praise.

The Sower - By Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Rodin sculpted hand touched by human hand





Source link

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

Clacton Arts Centre gallery to celebrate first anniversary

August 30, 2025 Art Gallery

Original drawings for National Gallery released including pool plans

August 29, 2025 Art Gallery

Giles Kime: ‘Why contemporary art should become a feature of everyday life’

August 29, 2025 Art Gallery

‘Weeds’ Star Mary-Louise Parker Is Creating a New Kind of Art Gallery

August 28, 2025 Art Gallery

FAB Paris, the international art fair returns to the Grand Palais this autumn

August 27, 2025 Art Gallery

Half of Brits have never been to art gallery as arts still seen as ‘privileged’

August 27, 2025 Art Gallery
Add A Comment
Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Don't Miss

Leading by example: EBL’s bold push into sustainable finance

August 30, 2025 Finance 5 Mins Read

From financing LEED-certified factories to pioneering green deposit products, EBL is reshaping the future of…

AP’s Tourism Receives Major Boost With ₹12,000 Crore Investments

August 30, 2025

Fraudsters convince victim to put $15,000 into cryptocurrency ATM: Westlake Police Blotter

August 30, 2025

Clacton Arts Centre gallery to celebrate first anniversary

August 30, 2025
Our Picks

Leading by example: EBL’s bold push into sustainable finance

August 30, 2025

AP’s Tourism Receives Major Boost With ₹12,000 Crore Investments

August 30, 2025

Fraudsters convince victim to put $15,000 into cryptocurrency ATM: Westlake Police Blotter

August 30, 2025

Clacton Arts Centre gallery to celebrate first anniversary

August 30, 2025
Our Picks

GCB Bank cautions public against fraudulent “GCB Investments” platform

August 29, 2025

Eric Trump sees bitcoin hitting $1 million, praises China cryptocurrency role

August 29, 2025

Avalanche (AVAX) holds $24, but experts agree Mutuum Finance (MUTM) is the best Cryptocurrency to buy before 2026

August 29, 2025
Latest updates

Leading by example: EBL’s bold push into sustainable finance

August 30, 2025

AP’s Tourism Receives Major Boost With ₹12,000 Crore Investments

August 30, 2025

Fraudsters convince victim to put $15,000 into cryptocurrency ATM: Westlake Police Blotter

August 30, 2025
Weekly Updates

Paul Tudor Jones on Why Gold and Bitcoin Are Smart Investments

October 25, 2024

In-demand artist Rone heads to Perth for Art Gallery of Western Australia exhibition TIME • RONE

May 21, 2024

Yoko Ono’s artistic career is celebrated at the Tate Modern – The Miscellany News

March 28, 2024
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Get In Touch
© 2025 Finance Pro

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.