The Night Café,(1888) by Vincent Van Gogh was meant to convey an atmosphere of evil through every possible discongruity of the color spectrum. It is supposed to be felt, and not simply observed. Van Gogh described it in a letter to his brother Theo:

"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity 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 sleepy 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 the soft, tender Louise XV green of the counter, on which there is a pink nosegay. The white coat of the landlord, awake in the corner of that furnace, turns citron-yellow, or pale luminous green." The proprietor, the seditious demon who rules over the place, rises like a specter from the edge of the billiard table, which is depicted in a steeply tilted perspective that suggests a spinning vertiginous world.

Van Gogh: A Self-portrait, Letters Revealing His Life As a Painter

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