You don’t under­stand pre­war 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca unless you under­stand a par­tic­u­lar 19th-cen­tu­ry French paint­ing: Jules Bre­ton’s The Song of the Lark. “In this evoca­tive work, a young peas­ant woman stands silent­ly in the flat fields of the artist’s native Nor­mandy as the sun ris­es, lis­ten­ing to the song of a dis­tant lark,” says a post from the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go. Apart from being select­ed as Amer­i­ca’s favorite paint­ing in 1934, it was also Eleanor Roo­sevelt’s favorite work of art, it pro­vid­ed the title for Willa Cather’s third nov­el, and it “inspired Bill Mur­ray while he was strug­gling as an actor in Chica­go.”

In the video above, a clip from a press con­fer­ence on the Mur­ray-fea­tur­ing his­tor­i­cal art-heist film The Mon­u­ments Men, he tells the sto­ry of how The Song of the Lark saved him. “This may be a lit­tle bit not-com­plete­ly-true,” Mur­ray says, “but it’s pret­ty true.”

When he first start­ed act­ing on the stage in his home­town of Chica­go, he did­n’t quite have the skills that have made him such a com­pelling pres­ence for more than forty years on the screen. After what sounds like one par­tic­u­lar­ly poor ear­ly per­for­mance — poor enough to make him con­sid­er his life prac­ti­cal­ly over — he took a despair­ing walk toward Lake Michi­gan, think­ing, “If I’m going to die where I am, I may as well go over to the lake and float for a while after I’m dead.”

But then a sud­den, impul­sive turn up Michi­gan Avenue took Mur­ray to the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, and there he found him­self in front of The Song of the Lark, which has now hung there for over a cen­tu­ry. The sight of it got him think­ing: “ ‘Well, there’s a girl who does­n’t have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun’s com­ing up any­way and she’s got anoth­er chance at it.’ So I think that gave me some sort of feel­ing that I, too, am a per­son, and I get anoth­er chance every day the sun comes up.” Many of the Great Depres­sion-era Amer­i­cans who admired Bre­ton’s paint­ing must have drawn sim­i­lar feel­ings from it, just as sure­ly as many of Mur­ray’s fans have found inspi­ra­tion in all his char­ac­ters, art­ful­ly craft­ed between the comedic and the dra­mat­ic — char­ac­ters that, with­out The Song of the Lark, he may nev­er have lived to per­form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Bill Mur­ray Explains How He Pulled Him­self Out of a Deep, Last­ing Funk: He Took Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice & Lis­tened to the Music of John Prine

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

Bill Mur­ray Reads the Poet­ry of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er, Lucille Clifton & More

Lis­ten to Bill Mur­ray Lead a Guid­ed Medi­a­tion on How It Feels to Be Bill Mur­ray

Art Exhib­it on Bill Mur­ray Opens in the UK

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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. “At first glance, you can see what he meant,” says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in the explain­er above. “This is a jar­ring image, even for van Gogh, espe­cial­ly when you com­pare it to his oth­er famous scene of a café in Arles, Café Ter­race at Night,” which “cap­tures that roman­tic sense of Euro­pean cafés on sum­mer evenings where friends gath­er to talk and laugh.” And yet The Night Café is “a paint­ing of anx­i­ety,” offer­ing the night­mare to Café Ter­race at Night’s “dream of French night life.”

Just as van Gogh used col­or “to cap­ture his emo­tion­al response to nat­ur­al beau­ty” in oth­er paint­ings, here he used col­or “to con­vey the uneasi­ness of a low-class bar­room after mid­night.” Puschak digs into the artist’s let­ters and finds clear­ly stat­ed intent behind all this: “I’ve tried to express the ter­ri­ble human pas­sions with the red and the green,” wrote van Gogh. “Every­where it’s a bat­tle and an antithe­sis of the most dif­fer­ent greens and reds.” Puschak goes on to break down all the ele­ments van Gogh used to delib­er­ate­ly make The Night Café unset­tling: mak­ing the wall of the space “a thick, oppres­sive rib­bon the col­or of blood,” a col­or that clash­es with the green of the ceil­ing and cre­ates “a ten­sion that trem­bles in the eye,” and using on the rest of the inte­ri­or “a sul­fur yel­low that gets into every­thing.”

The mood is set by much more than col­or: the lack of shad­ows apart from that cast by the pool table, the hunched pos­ture of the patrons and the scat­tered posi­tions of the chairs and glass­es, the “warped qual­i­ty” of the per­spec­tive itself. “There’s no escape,” Puschak says, “not for the peo­ple inside the paint­ing, not for the peo­ple out­side it” — and not for van Gogh him­self, who com­mit­ted his famous act of ear-slic­ing mere months after fin­ish­ing The Night Café. But through this inescapable paint­ing we can see as well as or bet­ter than in any oth­er how van Gogh’s artis­tic mas­tery real­ly worked, and how mas­tery in ser­vice of some­thing oth­er than beau­ty remains mas­tery all the same.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

A Com­plete Archive of Vin­cent van Gogh’s Let­ters: Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed and Ful­ly Anno­tat­ed

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Edward Hopper’s Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.