Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece

Ask passersby to name a Vincent van Gogh painting off the top of their heads, and most will come up with works like The Starry Night, The Potato Eaters, one of his self-portraits (probably with his ear bandaged), or maybe the one with the smoking skeleton David Sedaris used for a book cover.
 How many will mention 1888's The Night Café, an interior, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo from Arles (the town in the south of France where he had come in search of Japan-like surroundings), "of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening," the kind of place that never closes, accommodating the kind of "night prowlers" who "have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in"? Promising subject matter for a painter, one might think.
When Vincent wrote back to Theo after completing The Night Café, he described the painting "one of the ugliest I've done," but that doesn't necessarily mean he saw it as a failure, or indeed that we shouldn't see it as a masterpiece.
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