La Guinguette (Van Gogh’s first painting of a Parisian café before his move to Arles) introduces us to Van Gogh’s initial detachment from the café. Unlike the Night Café, La Guinguette places the observer just outside the café. In this painting, we begin to see both elements of the café and its natural surroundings. Van Gogh has now removed himself from the inside of the café, and although the café is at the forefront of the painting, we can see that he has begun to distance himself physically from the café. Wilhelm Uhde, the author of Vincent Van Gogh, suggests that Van Gogh “spent most of his life seeking amidst sorrow, pain and despair after the simplest the most obvious thing in existence, the sun” (Uhde 2). It is inherent within the language of this passage (i.e. sorrow, pain and despair) that Uhde explains van Gogh’s desire to embark on a quest to find peace by means of a more natural calming influence in all the wrong places. It is for this reason that we first see the emergence of natural light just outside a Parisian café in La Guinguette, representative of Van Gogh’s initial progression away from the artificial temptations of the café toward the calming influence of the outdoors. Van Gogh might have been searching for peace in France’s cafés, but he failed to discover a perpetual peace within them. In his pursuit of a calming influence, Van Gogh’s attraction to the artificial pleasures of the café almost destroyed him, and as a result, Van Gogh sought peace in the less ruinous calming influence of the outdoors. In a letter to his brother, Van Gogh tells us that the “purer nature of a countryside compared with the suburbs and cabarets of Paris” (Van Gogh 595) provided him with a more perpetual and sincere calming influence, one that would not destroy him or make him go mad. When Van Gogh says, “I have no other wish than to live deep in the heart of the countryside” (qtd. Blumer), we see that Van Gogh’s determination to find the calm in the outdoors is resolute. Van Gogh’s pursuit of a calming influence in the outdoors becomes more apparent after he moves to Arles, an agrarian village far south of bustling Parisian cafés, where he continues to distance himself from the café and its artificial pleasures as he progresses toward the outdoors.
Van Gogh tells us that he wanted to move to Arles because he was “wishing to see a new light” (qtd. Guillaud). Wanting to escape the false sense of pleasure of the café, Van Gogh embarked on a quest to find a more perpetual sense of peace as he distanced himself from the café (artificial light) bit by bit. Van Gogh tells Theo in a letter, “when I left you at the station to go south I was very miserable, almost an invalid and almost a drunkard. Now [in Arles] at last something is beginning to show on the horizon: Hope” (Van Gogh). The passage tells us that Van Gogh realized his need of a calming influence in nature; Van Gogh’s desire to find peace in the outdoors is evidenced merely by the fact that Van Gogh had moved away from Paris to the countryside in Arles. The café had nearly ruined Van Gogh, made him go mad, as he had become in his own words, “almost an invalid, and almost a drunkard” (Van Gogh). While in Arles, Van Gogh further evidences his struggle to escape the inequity of the café by creating an even larger void between natural and artificial light in the Café Terrace at Night as he continues his gradual progression away from the cafes toward the calming influence of the outdoors.