THE NIGHT CAFE

The Night Café - Vincent Van Gogh (September 1888)

The Night Café was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1888 using oil paints on canvas. The combination of the oils and canvas give the painting a rough texture, as the colours and brush strokes are not blended seamlessly due to the viscosity of the oil paints and the textured surface of the canvas.

Although the image is 2D, Van Gogh has used linear perspective to create the illusion of depth within the image. The use of horizon lines and vanishing points gives the impression of 3D objects within the room. This offers viewers a better representation of the scenario as the painting appears more realistic.

The colours used within the painting represent more than just the state the cafe was imagined in. Van Gogh quoted in a letter he wrote to his brother;

"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."

This quote encourages my personal opinion to believe that Van Gogh was trying to use colours as a semiotic - creating colours that clash in order to represent the disparities within humanity and quite possibly the characters in his painting. This technique of using semiotics in order to tell the story of the characters in the cafe gives the painting a more intriguing and subliminal message - to me, the message is that we all have our differences despite the fact we appear the same.