Starry night over the Rhone description. Starry night over the Rhone

Vincent Van Gogh. Starlight Night. 1889 Museum of Modern Art, New York

Starlight Night. This is not just one of Van Gogh's most famous paintings. This is one of the most notable paintings in all Western painting. What is so unusual about it?

Why, once you see it, don’t you forget it? What kind of air vortices are depicted in the sky? Why are stars so big? And how did a painting that Van Gogh considered unsuccessful become an “icon” for all expressionists?

I have collected the most interesting facts and mysteries of this picture. Which reveal the secret of her incredible attractiveness.

1. “Starry Night” was written in a mental hospital

The painting was painted during a difficult period in Van Gogh's life. Six months earlier, living together with Paul Gauguin ended badly. Van Gogh's dream of creating a southern workshop, a union of like-minded artists, did not come true.

Paul Gauguin left. He could no longer stay close to his unstable friend. Every day there are quarrels. And one day Van Gogh cut off his earlobe. And he handed it to a prostitute who preferred Gauguin.

Exactly what they did with a defeated bull at a bullfight. The cut off ear of the animal was given to the winning matador.

Van Gogh could not stand the loneliness and the collapse of his hopes for the workshop. His brother placed him in a shelter for the mentally ill in Saint-Rémy. This is where “Starry Night” was written.

All his mental strength was strained to the limit. That's why the picture turned out to be so expressive. Fascinating. Like a bundle of bright energy.

2. “Starry Night” is an imaginary, not a real landscape

This fact is very important. Because Van Gogh almost always worked from life. This was the issue over which they most often argued with Gauguin. He believed that you need to use your imagination. Van Gogh had a different opinion.

But in Saint-Rémy he had no choice. The sick were not allowed to go outside. It was forbidden to even work in one’s own room. Brother Theo agreed with the hospital authorities that the artist would be given a separate room for his workshop.

So it’s in vain that researchers try to find out the constellation or determine the name of the town. Van Gogh took all this from his imagination.

3. Van Gogh depicted turbulence and the planet Venus

The most mysterious element of the picture. In the cloudless sky we see vortex flows.

Researchers are confident that Van Gogh depicted the phenomenon of turbulence. Which can hardly be seen with the naked eye.

The consciousness, aggravated by mental illness, was like a bare wire. To such an extent that Van Gogh saw what an ordinary mortal could not.

400 years earlier, another person realized this phenomenon. A person with a very subtle perception of the world around him. . He created a series of drawings with vortex flows of water and air.

Another interesting element of the picture is the incredibly large stars. In May 1889, Venus could be observed in the south of France. She inspired the artist to depict bright stars.

You can easily guess which of Van Gogh's stars is Venus.

4. Van Gogh thought Starry Night was a bad painting.

The painting was painted in a manner characteristic of Van Gogh. Thick long strokes. Which are neatly placed next to each other. Rich blue and yellow colors make it very pleasing to the eye.

However, Van Gogh himself considered his work unsuccessful. When the painting came to the exhibition, he casually commented about it: “Maybe it will show others how to depict night effects better than I did.”

This attitude towards the picture is not surprising. After all, it was not written from life. As we already know, Van Gogh was ready to argue with others until he was blue in the face. Proving how important it is to see what you write.

This is such a paradox. His “unsuccessful” painting became an “icon” for the Expressionists. For whom imagination was much more important than the outside world.

5. Van Gogh created another painting with a starry night sky

This is not the only Van Gogh painting with night effects. The year before, he wrote “Starry Night over the Rhone.”

The Starry Night, which is in New York, is fantastic. The cosmic landscape eclipses the earth. We don’t even immediately see the town at the bottom of the picture.

Plot

Night enveloped the imaginary city. In the foreground are cypress trees. These trees, with their gloomy dark green foliage, symbolized sadness and death in the ancient tradition. (It is no coincidence that cypress trees are often planted in cemeteries.) In the Christian tradition, cypress is a symbol of eternal life. (This tree grew in the Garden of Eden and, presumably, Noah's Ark was built from it.) In Van Gogh, the cypress plays both roles: the sadness of the artist, who will soon commit suicide, and the eternity of the universe running.

Self-portrait. Saint-Rémy, September 1889

To show movement, to add dynamics to the frozen night, Van Gogh came up with a special technique - when painting the moon, stars, sky, he laid strokes in a circle. This, combined with color transitions, creates the impression that the light is spilling.

Context

Vincent painted the painting in 1889 at the Saint-Paul Mental Hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It was a period of remission, so Van Gogh asked to go to his workshop in Arles. But city residents signed a petition demanding that the artist be expelled from the city. “Dear Mayor,” the document says, “we, the undersigned, would like to draw your attention to the fact that this Dutch artist (Vincent Van Gogh) has lost his mind and drinks too much. And when he gets drunk, he molests women and children.” Van Gogh will never return to Arles.

Drawing en plein air at night fascinated the artist. The depiction of color was of paramount importance to Vincent: even in letters to his brother Theo, he often described objects using different colors. Less than a year before Starry Night, he wrote Starry Night over the Rhone, in which he experimented with the rendering of the colors of the night sky and artificial lighting, which was a novelty at that time.

"Starry Night over the Rhone", 1888

The fate of the artist

Van Gogh lived 37 turbulent and tragic years. Growing up as a disliked child, who was perceived as a son who was born instead of his older brother, who died a year before the boy was born, the severity of his father-pastor, poverty - all this affected Van Gogh’s psyche.

Not knowing what to devote himself to, Vincent could not finish his studies anywhere: either he quit, or he was kicked out for his violent antics and sloppy appearance. Painting was an escape from the depression Van Gogh faced after his failures with women and his failed careers as a dealer and missionary.

Van Gogh also refused to study to become an artist, believing that he could master everything on his own. However, it was not so easy - Vincent never learned to draw a person. His paintings attracted attention, but were not in demand. Disappointed and saddened, Vincent left for Arles with the intention of creating the “Workshop of the South” - a kind of brotherhood of like-minded artists working for future generations. It was then that Van Gogh's style took shape, which is known today and was described by the artist himself as follows: “Instead of trying to accurately depict what is in front of my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, so as to express myself more fully.”

, 1890

In Arles, the artist lived a voracious life in every sense. He wrote a lot and drank a lot. Drunken brawls frightened local residents, who eventually even asked to expel the artist from the city. In Arles, the famous incident with Gauguin also occurred, when, after another quarrel, Van Gogh attacked his friend with a razor in his hands, and then, either as a sign of repentance, or in another attack, cut off his earlobe. All the circumstances are still unknown. However, the day after this incident, Vincent was taken to a hospital, and Gauguin left. They never met again.

During the last 2.5 months of his torn life, Van Gogh painted 80 paintings. And the doctor completely believed that everything was fine with Vincent. But one evening he locked himself in his room and did not come out for a long time. Neighbors, who suspected something was wrong, opened the door and found Van Gogh with a bullet through his chest. They failed to help him - the 37-year-old artist died.

In February 1888, on the advice of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh moved to Arles. Behind her are two years of Parisian life, more than two thousand works, none of which have found a buyer. Only the support of brother Theo, a close friend, adviser and the main addressee of his letters, saves him from complete despair. But here, in the south of France, far from the bustle of the capital, everything changes: Vincent’s tormented soul, at least for a short time, regains peace and harmony. Arles appears to the artist as a paradise, a place of dreams, a country of “Utopia”: flowering gardens and ancient parks of the city, unforgettable trips to the sea, sun-drenched surrounding fields and, of course, captivating southern nights.

“I often think that the night is livelier and richer in color than the day,” Vincent writes to his brother. During long night walks, everything that seemed gone, destroyed, forever forgotten, melted away along with youthful dreams, comes to life again with the same strength. It seemed that it would never be possible to return the years devoted to serving God, when the future artist read the Bible to the workers, shared with him his last clothes and money; never to resurrect that passionate, almost religious fervor with which he, having broken with his family, without looking back, devoted himself to painting. It seemed that everything had gone away... But the starry sky over Arles reminded Vincent of something important, and suddenly it became clear that the mystical attitude towards art had never left his heart, it had only temporarily hidden itself from the blows of fate in the most intimate corners of the soul, so that break out again. “At times I feel a terrible need - how can I put it - in religion,” he writes to his brother. “Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”

But how to write in the dark? Vincent is adamant and true to himself: he is not going, like his fellow workers, to create from memory or creating a picture in his imagination. He needs nature, real stars and real skies. And then he attaches a candle to his straw hat, collects brushes and paints and goes out to the banks of the Rhone to paint night landscapes...

“I would like to paint men and women, putting something of eternity into them...” And what could be better to reflect eternity than night and the starry sky? The small figures of a man and a woman in the corner of the picture are invisible and lost in the blurring perspective of the night city. Above them are the seven stars of the Big Dipper, seven small suns, shading the depths of the firmament with their radiance. The stars are so distant, but so accessible; they are part of Eternity, since they have always been here, unlike the city lamps, pouring their artificial light into the dark waters of the Rhone. The flow of the river slowly but surely dissolves the earthly lights and carries them away. Two boats at the pier invite you to follow, but people do not notice the earth signs, their faces are turned upward, to the starry sky.

“Whenever I see stars, I begin to dream as involuntarily as I dream when looking at the black dots that mark cities and villages on the map. Why, I ask myself, should the bright points on the sky be less accessible to us than the black points on the map of France? Just as a train carries us when we go to Rouen or Tarascon, death carries us to the stars.” The prophecy was soon destined to come true: less than two years remained before the artist’s tragic death...

Van Gogh's contemporary, French astronomer Camille Flamarion, reflecting on the posthumous fate of Galileo, Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and other great people, came to the conclusion that “their stars still shine, they exist somewhere in other spheres and in these other worlds continue his work interrupted on earth." Maybe even today someone, looking at the starry sky, will suddenly recognize in a small luminous point the modest star of the artist Vincent Van Gogh. He will learn and remember about eternity...

for the magazine "Man Without Borders"

Date of writing: 1888.
Type: oil on canvas.
Dimensions: 72.5*92 cm.

Starry night over the Rhone

This painting was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889, he painted this picture for a whole year. The work is done with large and voluminous strokes, this is the artist’s favorite technique. "Starry Night over the Rhone" made in dark, mostly blue, colors, changing into hundreds of different shades and combining with the yellow-golden color of the stars and city lights.

The main object of the canvas, of course, is the night sky. The viewer with the naked eye can observe the Ursa Major and the polar star in the sky, thanks to which one can find out exactly which side of the river the artist painted this landscape from. Closer to the center of the picture, the dark night sky appears lighter. The artist depicts the stars as very bright and large, their shape reminiscent of small fireworks.

In the background is the other bank of the river, on which stands a large and dark city, the outlines of which almost merge with the sky. The city is brightly lit with lanterns that look like stars. The lanterns are located close to the stars and their colors contrast greatly, the lanterns being much yellower. The glow emanating from the lanterns is reflected in the water surface of the river in long bright stripes.

When the viewer first sees this picture, his gaze is immediately drawn to the sky and the river, and only then does he notice that an elderly couple is strolling carefree along the nearby bank. They leisurely walk hand in hand along the damp beach, and near the shore three small boats serenely await departure. This picture is calming and brings good thoughts.

Stars in pictures

Van Gogh was very fond of the dark; during his life he painted several night landscapes, and he painted them directly at night from nature, illuminating the easel with a candle. He was fascinated by the beauty and mystery of the starry sky and dreamed a lot while looking at them. He also portrayed stars in the work. The artist often thought about death, but could not comprehend this topic. The stars were also out of reach for him, so he decided to depict them, putting his thoughts and emotions into his works. Many decades have passed since these paintings were created, but they still fascinate viewers with their beauty.

Painting "Starry Night over the Rhone" updated: October 23, 2017 by: Valentina