Name: Van Gogh's Ugliest Masterpiece
Uploaded: 2026-02-09T17:03:57.000Z
Duration: 7 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The painting is one of the ugliest I've done.

This is what Vincent van Gogh told his brother in a letter referencing this painting called Night Cafe.

And at first glance, you can see what he meant.

This is a jarring image, even for Van Gogh, especially when you compare it to his other famous scene of a cafe in Arles Cafe Terrace at night.

Here, Van Gogh captures that romantic scent of European cafes on summer evenings where friends gather to talk and laugh.

The blue starry sky complements the pool of orange and yellow gaslight under the terrace, which spills out over the cobblestones, tinged with violet and pink.

Compared to that, Night Cafe is a painting of anxiety.

If the exterior is the dream of French nightlife, the interior is the nightmare.

If the exterior is a place to talk and laugh, the interior depicts the cafe as a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes, as Vincent wrote in another letter to his brother.

From these letters we understand that the ugly, queasy quality of this painting was intentional, in the same way that he used color to capture his emotional response to natural beauty.

Here Van Gogh uses color to convey the uneasiness of a low class barroom after midnight.

And how can a quote unquote ugly painting also be a masterpiece?

To answer these questions, maybe the first place we should look is back in those letters.

In reference to Nightcafe, Van Gogh writes, here I've tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green everywhere.

It's a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds.

Van Gogh was an avid student of color, specifically Charles Blank's analysis of Michel Chevreul's color theory and Eugene Delacroix's paintings.

Here Van Gogh learned of the concept of simultaneous contrast, which says that when complementary colors are juxtaposed, they reinforce each other.

He also learned of optical mixing, which favored placing solid colors next to each other on the canvas instead of actually mixing the pigments together in order to get more vibrant colors and color relationships.

The basic insight is that every color on a painting and in the real world is influenced by the colors around it.

The Impressionists and the Post Impressionists use this relativity to push the effects of color further than ever before, and

maybe none more powerfully than Van Gogh.

So when he talks about a battle or an antithesis between green greens and reds in Nightcafe, this is what he means.

Green and red are complementary colors and exert a force on each other, just like blue and orange.

But whereas blue and Orange have a pleasing quality.

There's something punishing about green and red, a fact that was noted by another popular color theorist at the time, Ogden Rude.

Just a few months prior, he experimented with a similar color palette in his Portrait of a Zouave Soldier, commenting to his brother, it's a coarse combination of disparate tones that isn't easy to handle.

The problem wasn't just the harshness of red green contrast, but the lack of balance too.

Three months after Night Cafe, after Van Gogh's famous breakdown in which he cut off his ear, he found a way to use red and green in a self portrait that makes the contrast feel stable, even calm.

He does this by balancing two complementary pairs on either side of a horizontal line that cuts across at the eyes.

So if red green feels unintentionally unbalanced in the Zouave portrait and intentionally balanced in the self portrait, what would it look like if Van Gogh used these colors to make a painting that was intentionally unbalanced?

This is what I think he achieved in Night Cafe.

The wall of this interior space is a thick, oppressive ribbon, the color of blood.

That red clashes with the green of the ceiling, creating a tension that trembles in the eye.

There's no compositional balance between these colors.

The red overpowers the green, and both colors are jammed into the upper third of the canv.

The remaining space is dominated by a sulfur yellow that gets into everything.

It suffuses the green of the pool table and the bar offering further clashes with a red wall.

It pervades the blue of the countertops and the white of the bar owner's clothes.

That white should be a place for the eye to rest.

But Van Gogh stubbornly refuses us that feeling.

He refuses us and the lonely patrons shadows as well, except the single sinister shadow of the pool table that commands the center of the space.

Now it's not only col that communicates unease in this painting.

The patrons sit hunched over in their arms.

Several of the chairs are pushed away from the tables at odd angles.

The perspective, too, has a warped quality.

The lines of depth don't meet the same horizon, and

they're slightly curved, which gives you the sense of being yanked into the painting.

Once you're in there, the pool table and the floorboards rush you to the back door, which either leads to a back room or outside.

Not for the people inside the painting, not for the people outside it.

Two months after painting this, in late October, Van Gogh's friend Paul Gauguin would come to stay with him in Arles, relieving the loneliness that he was so clearly feeling.

Van Gogh dreamed of starting an artist collective in Arles, but

increasingly feared that Gauguin was going to leave him and move on.

That fear of abandonment, a return to the desperate loneliness that we can feel in Nightcafe, developed into a crisis by December.

And a few days before New Year's, he severed his left ear.

You know, Vincent Van Gogh was a painter of deep and acute feeling.

That feeling was inseparable from the way he perceived the world.

Van Gogh understood that to record what he saw without this aspect would have been dishonest, inhuman.

And so he used the magic of color to show us a truer world.

This is why his work still vibrates, literally with life, over a hundred years later.

This is why an ugly painting tapping into the ugliness in every psyche, can be a masterpiece.

Van Gogh is my absolute favorite painter.

Ever since I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I've just always been blown away by his work.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

If you want to make a website and you want it to be a really easy process, Squarespace has some beautiful award winning designer templates to choose from that makes that process so simple.

It's got 24 hour customer service, no upgrades, nothing to install, no patches ever.

And picking your domain name is really easy too.

You can start your free trial@squarespace.com and if you use the offer code Nerdwriter, you can get 10% off your first purchase.