The
Night Cafe, 1888
| Which he painted for
his landlord to pay the rent, “one of the ugliest pictures I have done”.
He has gone here beyond the agreeable side of the café world, to its darker disquieting
moments. “I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of
red and green.” “the equivalent though different, of the
Potato-Eaters”, it is a powerful corresponding image of an opposite human condition
– of the dissipated and homeless. Some days later, he wrote: “I have tried
to express the idea that the café is a place where the powers of darkness in a low drink
shop… and all this in an atmosphere like a devils furnace, of pale sulphur, all
under an appearance of Japanese gaiety and the good nature of Tartarin.” |
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