A billiard table with a green top stands in the middle of an almost empty room with red walls, a green ceiling and a steeply tilting yellow plank floor. Three lamps hang from the ceiling, each ringed with swirling halos of light. A man in a white coat stands beside the table, looking out at us; at the left and right a few customers slump over small tables, one with his head on his arms.

A bar at the back is topped with bottles and a vase of pink flowers, and a clock above the open doorway reads just after midnight. Vincent van Gogh painted the Café de la Gare, an all-night café on the Place Lamartine in Arles, run by Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie, who had rented him a room. Writing to his brother Theo, he described the sleeping 'hooligans' among the clashing reds and greens and the landlord's white clothes, watchful in a corner of that furnace. He wanted, he said, to express 'the terrible passions of humanity.' Ivan Morozov bought it in Moscow around 1908; it was nationalized in 1918, and Stephen Carlton Clark bought it in 1933 and left it to Yale. It is in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.