Cafe Terrace at Night - Van Gogh - Puzzle

70 cm x 50 cm
27.5" x 19.5"
1,000 pieces

Painted in 1888 while Van Gogh was staying in Arles, this work depicts the Place du Forum. This is the first painting in which he used starry backgrounds; he went on to paint star-filled skies in Starry Night Over the Rhône (painted the same month), and the better known The Starry Night a year later.

In a letter to his sister, Van Gogh wrote: 

“Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square is colored pale sulphur, lemon green. I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night. In the past they used to draw, and paint the picture from the drawing in the daytime. But I find that it suits me to paint the thing straightaway.” 

The painting now resides at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.

Vincent van Gogh (born March 30, 1853, Zundert, Netherlands—died July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, France) was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. He was not commercially successful, and his death at 37 came after years of mental illness, depression and poverty.