The ornament is hand-painted on the inside of the hand-blown glass bulb with oil paint using the “Reverse Painting” technique. The foreground is painted first and the background is applied last. All the painting is done from the inside through the hole at the top of a glass ball using special narrow brushes. There are several layers of paint applied to achieve the effect of depth. The card explaining the technique is included.
The ornament is 5.5 inches long large teardrop shape.
It is sealed with a blue glass cap and an adjustable gold tassel on a top that allows for display on a Christmas tree or a decorative stand.
It is packaged in a blue velvet gift box with satin-lined inside.
Cafe Terrace Van Gogh
Cafe Terrace at Night, also known as The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, is the first painting in which Van Gogh used starry backgrounds; he went on to paint star-filled skies in Starry Night Over the Rhone (which he painted the same month), and the better known Starry Night a year later.
Visitors of the site can still stand at the northeastern corner of the Place du Forum, where the artist set up his easel. He looked south towards the artificially lit terrace of the popular coffee house, as well as into the enforced darkness of the rue du Palais.
Van Gogh wrote a letter to his sister expressing his enthusiasm:
I was only interrupted by my work on a new painting representing the exterior of a night cafe. On the terrace there are small figures of people drinking. An immense yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the facade, the side walk and even casts light on the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone. The gables of the houses, like a fading road below a blue sky studded with stars, are dark blue or violet with a green tree. Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colors itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges.
The Painting itself has been in the permanent collection of the Kroller Muller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo in Netherlands, the museum that was founded by art collector Helene Kroller Muller and that has the second-largest collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, after the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam..
This ornament is a true collector's item. A beautiful display piece and a lovely present to an art lover. It will look great on a stand displayed separately on a mental or bookshelf.