Van Gogh used to repeat his paintings with some differences but here we have the Night Cafe painted with oil, right, and a watercolor, left. You can see how it the two mediums a different result is achieved. The watercolor seems more quiet while in the oil version the thickness of the paintbrushes and the brightness of the yellow makes the atmosphere more electric.
These works were done out of memory and imagination and these are Vincent's words about the oil version:
"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green."
Vincent Van Gogh
Tomorrow I will be back on this painting but in a different way.
