Van Gogh set up to paint the cafe terrace after dark rather than working from a daytime sketch, a method he found risky but preferred. Writing to his sister Wil, he admitted that in poor light he might take a blue for a green or a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since the quality of a tone is hard to judge after dark, but he considered it the only way to escape what he called the conventional night scene, painted with a poor, pale whitish light^[1]. He built the picture instead from an immense yellow lantern that colours the terrace, the shopfront and the pavement in warm tones, set against a sky of deep blue, violet and green, deliberately avoiding black altogether^[1].

The painting belongs to a run of Arles subjects van Gogh made in the weeks before Paul Gauguin's arrival, a visit he anticipated with real excitement. He worked from sunrise to sunset most days that September, ate at the Cafe de la Gare, and spent what money he had furnishing the Yellow House with beds, chairs and a mirror so it would be ready for a guest^[2]. Against that backdrop of preparation, the choice to paint an ordinary cafe terrace at night, filled with small figures simply drinking under gaslight, reads as one more attempt to capture Arles as he actually lived it, rather than a scene arranged for effect.

Café Terrace at Night is usually identified as the first painting in which van Gogh set a starry sky behind a nighttime scene, a device that recurs in his work over the following months and reaches its fullest expression the next year in The Starry Night^[1]. Here the stars remain secondary to the lit terrace itself, a scattering of points above the gabled rooftops rather than the animated, swirling sky of the later picture, but the underlying interest in painting a night lit by more than a single conventional light source is already fully present.