up; the bottom half supplies the 'facts.'" The thick paint adds a surreal touch of waviness to the table tops, billiard table and floor. The viewer is left with a feeling of seediness and despair, Harris wrote. "The scene might easily be banal and dispiriting; instead, it is dispiriting but also terrible." The objects of pleasure (billiard table, wine bottles and glasses) are contrasted in the picture with the "few human beings absorbed in their individual loneliness and despair", Antonia Lant commented. The perspective of the scene is one of its most powerful effects, according to various critics. Schapiro described the painting's "absorbing perspective which draws us headlong past empty chairs and tables into hidden depths behind a distant doorway — an opening like the silhouette of the standing figure." Lant described it as a "shocking perspectival rush, which draws us, by the converging diagonals of floorboards and billiard table, towards the mysterious, courtained doorway beyond." Harris wrote that the perspective "pitches the viewer forward into the room, towards the half-curtained private quarters, and also creates a sense of vertigo and distorted vision, familiar from nightmares." Schapiro also noted, "To the impulsive rush of these converging lines he opposes the broad horizontal band of red, full of scattered objects [...]" Gauguin's competition piece Soon after his arrival in Arles, Paul Gauguin painted the same location, as a background to his portrait of Madame Ginoux. While the Van Gogh painting depicts the café as a room of isolation, Gauguin's Night Café at Arles mixes the concepts of isolation (to the painting's left) and spirited socializing (in the center), behind Madame Ginoux. It was also acquired by Ivan Morozov and now hangs in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. History Van Gogh used the picture to settle debts with Ginoux, the landlord said to be depicted (standing) in it. Formerly a highlight of the Ivan Morozov collection in Moscow, the painting was nationalized and sold by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s. The painting was eventually acquired by Stephen Carlton Clark, who bequeathed it to the art gallery of Yale University. On March 24, 2009, Yale sued Pierre Konowaloff, Morozov's purported great-grandson, to maintain the university's title to the work. Konowaloff had allegedly asserted a claim to own the painting on the grounds that the Soviets had invalidly nationalized it. Yale dropped its lawsuit in October of that year, in a motion