“…The picture ['The Night Cafe'] is one of the ugliest I have done. It is the equivalent, though different, of the ‘Potato Eaters’. I have tried to espress the terrible passions of huminity by means of red and green.
The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four citron-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty, dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a pink nosegay. The white cat of the landlord, awake in a corner of that furnace, turns citron-yellow, or pale luminous green…”

~ Excerpts from Vincent van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo