Le café de nuit (The Night Café)

Van Gogh painted this canvas at Arles in September 1888, in the fifteen months he spent in the south of France, and described it to his brother Theo as a study of the night café as a place where a man could ruin himself, go mad or commit a crime. It left the artist’s studio for Theo, passed through the Moscow collection of the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov, and reached New Haven in 1961 with the bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903, of whose collection it had formed part. The museum publishes the French title, Le café de nuit, with the English one.