The magical cafe in van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night Café (1888) was at the northeastern corner of Place du Forum in Arles, France. Another title for the painting is actually The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum.
In 1944, the original site was destroyed during an Allied bombings. In the early 2000s, three Arles residents recreated the site to look exactly like van Gogh's painting, opening Café la Nuit. Sadly, it closed in 2023, as its owners faced charges of tax evasion.
The house from Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth (1948) still stands today. It's called the Olson House, and it is about 30 minutes south of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Cushing. Brother and sister Alvaro and Christina Olson inspired Christina's World and some 300 other paintings and drawings by Wyeth. The Olson's were neighbors of Wyeth's, and Christina had a degenerative muscle condition (probably polio). She didn't want to use a wheelchair and preferred to crawl, as depicted in the painting.
Art Historian Joachim Pissarro writes: "For Monet in Venice, time was not to be one of the factors of variations for his motifs. Rather, it was the 'air,' or what he called 'the envelope' – the surrounding atmospheric conditions, the famous Venetian haze – that became the principal factor of variation with these motifs."
The Oxford High Street, depicted in a painting by JMW Turner in 1810, remains almost unchanged today, many art critics say. It's true that the buildings have remained the same, but the street is often marred by cars, hordes of tourists, and unaesthetic-looking street signs.
Turner did 10 watercolors of Oxford between 1798 and 1804 and two oils, one of which was High Street. When considering Oxford landscapes for a series of his greatest watercolors, he rejected this one. He believed it had an "unparalleled view of technical mastery that he could not repeat."
