Vincent van Gogh’s The Night Café (1888): a masterpiece handed over for rent

Deep in debt for rent and food, Van Gogh offered his landlords, the Ginoux couple, a newly finished painting instead of risking eviction from his room above their Arles railway-station café. Resenting their penny-pinching and complaints, he painted the café in feverish reds and greens. He later described it to his brother as “a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.”

The Ginouxes thought it a dreadful mess but accepted it as payment, then sold it for next to nothing to a Paris dealer in the 1890s. In 1908, Russian collector Ivan Morozov bought it for a fortune. Today, The Night Café is hailed as an Expressionist masterpiece worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

SimplyLogo