Article on Stealing van Gogh

Robert L. Moshman (Attorney, New York and New Jersey) recently published his article entitled, Stealing van Gogh, The Estate Analyst (Mar. 2014). An excerpt from the article is below:

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh stayed up for three nights in a row to paint an all-night café in Arles, France, that was frequented by derelicts who enjoyed drinking and playing billiards (and Paul Gauguin, who painted the same café). In a letter to his brother, Theo, he wrote:

“In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.”