Art Wall"s The Night Cafe in the Place Lamartine in Arles by Vincent van Gogh 14x18 Gallery Wrapped Canvas. Night Cafe by Van Gogh was painted in September 1888 while he was living in Arles. Earlier in the year he had moved to a room at the Cafe de la Gare, where the room depicted in this painting was. Van Gogh stayed there for a few months over the summer. Exaggerated perspective creates disorienting angles and results with the majority of the painting being filled with the deep yellow floor. The walls are a rich red, contrasting with the yellow floors and yellow lights hanging from the ceiling. In a letter to his brother, Van Gogh called the painting the ugliest I"ve done and gave it to Joseph Ginoux the owner of the cafe as payment for his room. His calling the painting ugly is also a description of the room and the feeling you get from it. In his description of the painting, he uses words like blood-red to describe the color on the walls, battle to describe the contrast of reds and greens and refers to those in the room as ruffians. The harsh colors and disorienting perspective reflect the overall sadness, bitterness and loneliness, of those in the room. All of this adds up to an idea of if you are in this cafe at that late hour, something isn"t going right in your life. Van Gogh spent three nights painting this room sleeping during the day. He saw this as showing terrible human passions and that one can ruin themselves in a place like this cafe. Vincent didn"t praise this painting in his letters, but spoke of it in the same sentences as The Potato Eaters and The Sower, two paintings that he was very proud of.