A café terrace glows yellow and orange under a broad awning on the left, its tables and chairs spilling onto a cobbled square where a few people sit and a waiter in white stands among them. To the right, dark blue houses and a leafy green tree frame the street, where figures stroll toward the light. Above, a deep blue sky is scattered with large stars, and the cobbles are laid in thick strokes of blue, violet and orange. Vincent van Gogh painted the gas-lit terrace of a café on the Place du Forum in Arles in September 1888, working on the spot in the dark.

The Kröller-Müller Museum says he deliberately avoided the usual black-and-gray night scene; he wrote that an abundance of gaslight, being yellow and orange, intensifies blue. To his sister Wil he wrote that he enormously enjoyed painting on the spot at night. Later astronomical research showed that the stars are placed just as the constellations appeared over Arles on the night of September 16 or 17, 1888. Most of the museum's Van Gogh paintings were bought by Helene Kröller-Müller between 1908 and 1930.

It is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.