The night stars scene (this is something that had only just become important to Van Gogh) offers the visual First, his synthesis of motifs was his first echo of work with Gauguin since his breakdown. Them some time I shall be able to give you a better idea of the things Gauguin, Bernard and I often used to talk about and occupy ourselves with than I can do in words it is not a return to Romanticism or to religious ideas, no.īut via Delacroixone can express more of Nature and the country, by means of colour and an individual drawing style, than might appear." Although I have not seen the new pictures by Gauguin and Bernard, I am fairly certain that these two studies are similarly conceived. I have done another landscape with olive trees, and a new study of the 'starry sky'. Van Gogh described this night stars painting in his letter to his brother Theo: Together with the firmament, these landscapeįeatures are singing the praises of Creation in this painting. Confident that he had grasped their natural appearance, van Gogh set out to remake their image in the service of the symbolic. Van Gogh's mountains and trees (particularly the cypresses) had hardly beenĭiscovered but they seemed to crackle with an electric charge. The church spire seems to be stretching up into the elements,Īt once an antenna and a lightning conductor, like some kind of provincial Eiffel Tower (the fascination of which was never far from van Gogh's nocturnes). The village itself might be anywhere, Saint-Remy or Nuenen recalled in a nocturnal mood. Universe cradles the human settlement idyllically, yet also surrounds it menacingly. Van Gogh's treatment of his motifs prompts associations with fire, mist and the sea,and the elemental power of the natural scene combines with the intangible cosmic drama of the stars. It is framed by his newly-discovered motifs: at left a cypress towers skywards, at right a group of olive trees cluster into the cloud, and against the horizon run the The artist is looking down on a village from an imaginary viewpoint. Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star."
Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France?. Several months after painting Starry Night, in Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, he wrote: The sole exception is the village in the foreground with its architectural elements. One has the impression that the artist has expelled his inner conflict onto a canvas.Įverything here is brewed in a huge cosmic fusion.
In an enclosure," he wrote in May of 1889, "above which in the morning I see the sunrise in its glory."Īn end-of-the-world cataclysm invades Van Gogh's Starry Night, one of apocalypse filled with melting aerolites and comets adrift. "Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat Thus, in addition to descriptions evident in the myriad of letters he wrote to his brother, Theo, it offers a rare nighttime glimpse into what the artist saw while in isolation. Though Van Gogh revisited this scene in his work on several occasions, "Starry Night" is the only nocturnal study of the view. Starry Night depicts a dreamy interpretation of the artist's asylum room's sweeping view of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Widely hailed as Van Gogh's magnum opus, this Vincent van Gogh night stars painting depicts the view outside his sanatorium room window at night, although it was painted from memory during the day. The Starry Night, 1889 by Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe.