Vincent van Gogh’s The Night Café (1888): A masterpiece paid in rent

Deep in debt for lodging and food, van Gogh offered the Ginoux couple, who ran a café in Arles, a painting to keep from being evicted. Resenting their complaints, he depicted their café in oppressive red and green, calling it “a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.”

The owners found it disturbing, accepted it toward his debt, then sold it for next to nothing to a Paris dealer in the 1890s. In 1908, Russian collector Ivan Morozov bought it for far more. Today, The Night Café is considered an Expressionist masterpiece, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

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