The Café Terrace At Night

Vincent van Gogh's The Cafe Terrace is one of the painter's most remarkable and famous works as well as the first in a trilogy of starlit skies.  More than one hundred years after Vincent painted it, the Cafe Terrace is still in Arles, now called the Cafe Van Gogh.

When you see the café today, the outside walls are bright yellow, which is what it looks like in the painting. But in Van Gogh’s time, they weren’t in fact yellow, but a dull sandy color like a neighboring building. The yellow in the painting is Van Gogh’s interpretation of the light cast by a big gas lamp. This was the painting he did with the candles stuck to his felt hat so that he could see his canvas.


The original The Café Terrace at Night is currently on display at the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.

Sunflowers

Fields of sunflowers are everywhere in the South of France – and not just growing in the ground. Provencal linens, pottery and tile seem to echo the bright blues and yellows that Van Gogh talked about when painting in the region.
The latin name for sunflowers is Helianthus annus – which comes from the greek word helios (sun) and anthus (flower).

The French word for sunflower is tournesol, and is literally a perfect translation. “Turn sun” illustrates the fact that young sunflowers orient themselves towards the sun, which is exactly what they do.
Provence is the land of Van Gogh – who lived in the area and was inspired by the light and the sunflowers as you may know from his famous sunflower series of paintings.