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Analysis Of Le Cafe De Nuit

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Le Café de Nuit by Vincent van Gogh is possibly one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, located at the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. It stands at 28 1/2 inches tall and has a width of 36 1/4 inches, and for being nearly 130 years old this piece is extremely well preserved. This is an oil painting done on canvas circa 1888, that depicts the Café de l’Alcazar, a place where van Gogh often ate his meals, and watched as the walls of this building slowly filled with prostitutes and vagrants each night. In a letter to his brother, the night café was vibrantly explained for exactly what is seen now on the canvas. The strong linear pattern in this painting is directly related to the one-point perspective used in crafting the room and the furniture in it. The floor boards are the strongest representation of the linear pattern, pushing the viewers eye diagonally back from the negative space in the bottom left corner, to lively back wall of the room that is cluttered with a bar, an open door, and fellow civilians sitting at a table. Other objects like the pool table in the middle of the room, assorted side tables and the paneling on the walls also helps to guide the eye in the same way. The inherent nature of this line pattern is to create a sense of depth in the room and a sense of space across the entirety of the picture plane. The rhythm of the objects in the room follow a mostly mellow, legato pattern with some staccato characteristics. A legato rhythm is found in the

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