Arles, 1888

The record dates The Night Cafe to 1888, the Arles year. Night subjects are scarce in this catalogue and concentrated exactly here: five works carry "night" in the title, three of them dated 1888. Painting an interior after dark is a practical problem as much as a pictorial one, and the record shows the painter taking it on only in the south.

What the record gives

The canvas is 89 x 70 cm, an upright, and it is held by the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven — one of the few works in this catalogue held by a university museum in the United States. The measured palette resolves to a single dominant family: yellow. That is the standard 1888 reading; yellow dominates 93 of the 135 works dated to that year.

Where it sits among the Arles interiors

Arles is the period in which van Gogh painted the rooms he was living among rather than only the country outside them: this catalogue holds the yellow house itself, a bedroom, two chairs, a café at night indoors and a café terrace at night outdoors, all dated 1888 or 1889. Read chronologically, the Arles year is the point at which the painter stops being a landscapist who travels and starts recording a place he occupies.