The Night Cafe: Gauguin's VS Van Gogh's

While Vincent van Gogh painted The Night Café (1888) as a ‘devil’s furnace’ ‘where one can ruin one’s self’ (van Gogh 3: 31) a place where drinkers are ‘ruined’ by depression and solitude, his fellow Gauguin portrayed the same venue from a very different angle in his Night Café, Arles(1888). Instead of merely presenting degradation, the French Post-Impressionist depicted a combination of conviviality and isolation. The juxtaposition between the two paintings suggests that van Gogh could have extracted lonesome elements from the scene to conjure a reflection of his overwhelming solitude.

Van Gogh painted The Night Café in the September of 1888, when he lived alone in Arles. Gauguin moved in to live with him a month later, and painted the Night Café, Arles in November. We can easily discern that the two canvases depict the same place. Although Gauguin chose a perspective that captures a slice across the scene and is transverse to van Gogh’s fisheye-lens vision which encompasses a panorama, the two paintings include the same red walls, dado, picture frames, as well as furniture - marble-top tables, mass-produced chairs, gas lamps and billiard table (Crussard 2:519). This place, in fact, was the Café de la Gare beneath their shared room on 30 Cavalerie Avenue (Sylvie 520).

Elements of depression and socializing coexist in Gauguin’s Night Café, Arles. While the two men on the left appear languid and desolated as one sits with a hunched back and the other sprawls on the table, both devoid of interaction, their adjacent table features a contrast, as four customers enjoy a leisurely conversation over their drinks in a small circle. The group appears engaged in their dialogues - the postman on the left seems to accentuate his words with hand gestures, while the opposite lady tilts her head as if she nods to show agreement. Smiling as she watches her customers, the café owner in the foreground appears to enjoy herself in the café rather than feeling depressed. While the listlessness of the two men in the scene concurs with van Gogh’s painting, the convivial and joyous characters have no counterparts in van Gogh’s The Night Café, although they can be found in his earlier sketch Men in Front of the Counter in a Café (undated), which he presumably drew when he enjoyed drinking as a means to socialize.

Since Gauguin had no apparent reason to fabricate the conviviality in Night Café, Arles, we can only conclude that perhaps van Gogh had excluded such an aspect when he painted The Night Café. This is possible as van Gogh felt overwhelming solitary at the time, because he had to live and work alone without Gauguin or any other company (van Gogh 2: 606), and probably found it hard to socialize with others without the help of alcohol to enliven himself. Such solitude could have influenced the way he perceived his surroundings as well as the perspective he chose to paint The Night Café, as he might have used the canvas as a way to express his misery.

Images:

Upper: Van Gogh, Vincent. The Night Cafe. 1888.Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Lower: Gauguin, Paul. Night Cafe, Arles. 1888. Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.