Le café de nuit (The Night Café)

The Night Café was painted over three nights in September 1888 at the Café de la Gare on Place Lamartine in Arles, run by Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie. Van Gogh joked in a letter that Ginoux had taken so much of his money that it was time to take revenge by painting the place. After van Gogh's death the painting passed to his sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who sold it to the Russian textile magnate Ivan Morozov in 1908. Morozov's collection was nationalized by the Soviet state in 1918; the painting was later sold by the Soviets through the New York dealer Knoedler & Co. in 1933 to Stephen Carlton Clark, a Yale alumnus and heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, who bequeathed it to the Yale University Art Gallery.