Café Terrace at Night is a Vincent van Gogh painting from September 1888, made in Arles in the south of France. It shows a lamp-lit café terrace on the Place du Forum under a blue night sky with stars, and it hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in the Netherlands.

What the Painting Shows

The picture is built on one contrast. The terrace and the cobbles in front of it glow yellow and orange from a large gas lamp, and everything around them falls away into blues, violets and greens. A waiter in a white coat crosses the terrace, a few customers sit at the tables, and at the end of the street a doorway shows a faint light. Above the rooftops the sky is full of stars.

Van Gogh had been in Arles for about seven months when he made it. In his letters he wrote that he wanted to paint night scenes outdoors, and he described this one as a night picture painted without black. Whether or not you take every word literally, the effect is easy to see: the darks are deep blue, not grey, so the yellow reads as light and not as paint.

Café Terrace and Starry Night Over the Rhône

He painted a second night scene in Arles the same month, Starry Night Over the Rhône, which hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It has the same logic: a handful of warm lights against a large field of cool blue. If you know The Starry Night from Saint-Rémy, these two Arles pictures are the calmer, earlier relatives, more about lamplight and water than about a swirling sky.

A Note on the Kits

Our Cafe Terrace kit is a night café scene with stars and street lighting, not a copy of Van Gogh's canvas. If you want his Arles work specifically, the Starry Night over the Rhone kit is the one painted after his picture. Each kit comes as a pre-printed canvas with numbered paints and brushes.

How to Paint a Night Scene by Numbers

Night kits behave differently from a sunny landscape, because most of the canvas is dark and the interest sits in a few small lit areas.

• Do the big dark zones first. Sky, water and shadow take the most paint, and finishing them gives the lit areas something to shine against.
• Keep the lights for last. Yellows and oranges sit next to deep blues. Painting them after the neighbors are dry keeps the edges clean.
• Cover each number fully. Acrylic dries quickly, so a second thin coat over a dark number is easy, and it stops the printed digit from showing through a pale color.
• Stand back from time to time. A night picture reads from a distance. Check it at arm's length before you decide a zone is done.

More Night Scenes and Famous Paintings

For more after-dark subjects, browse the city collection and the landscape collection. If you are choosing for someone else, our best seller range is a safe place to start.