Description
Café at Arles – the two people in front are van Gogh’s sitters
A woman sits in the foreground at a round table with a marble top; a siphon and a glass stand in front of her, and she rests her head on one hand. Behind her a green billiard table runs across the room, with white balls and the cue lying on it. The walls are brick red and two lamps hang from the ceiling. At a table further back a group is sitting: a bearded man in a cap and three women in the dress of Arles, while at the left edge someone sleeps with a lowered head. The floor is reddish and the room is closed and low. The work is held by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow under inventory number Zh-3367; it was painted in 1888.
Both recognised faces were painted by van Gogh as well
The museum record names both people. The woman in the foreground is Madame Ginoux, the wife of the man who kept the place. The bearded man in the cap, seated at the table with three women of Arles, is Roulin the postman. Both are known from the portraits Vincent van Gogh painted. Gauguin, then, did not go looking for sitters of his own: he painted the people who in those same weeks were also sitting for his host. The scene is a town café and a double portrait of two acquaintances from the same street at once.
The café on the station square
The record gives the place as well. Gauguin painted the canvas in September 1888 at Arles, in the south of France, where he had come at his friend’s invitation. The café stood on the station square, opposite the house in which van Gogh was living at the time. The picture therefore shows no ordinary bar, but a room a few steps from the door of both painters.
Large areas of colour
The museum describes the work as one built on the harmony of large areas of colour. It shows at once: the green table, the red wall and the reddish floor are laid in as unbroken surfaces, without fine shading. The outlines are drawn with a dark line. That is exactly why the room reads as flat and decided at the same time, and why the colour carries the painting more than the drawing does.
The signature on the canvas
At the lower right a signature with a year is painted onto the canvas, and it confirms when the work was made. It is laid on in the same colour as the surface around it, so it has to be looked for; once it has been seen, it stays perfectly legible.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the red wall is the hardest part: too even and the room loses its depth, too restless and the quiet surface the painting stands on is lost. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.
- Subject: the interior of a café with a billiard table and a group at the back.
- Technique: oil on canvas, broad areas of red and green.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 32 cm to 200 x 160 cm; 80 x 64 cm and 100 x 80 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the two people identified in the picture also sat for van Gogh.
From the same months at Arles, see also Landscape near Arles, Les Alyscamps and Arlesiennes (Mistral). The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 72 x 92 cm.
