The Starry Night Over The Rhone (1888) by Vincent van Gogh

The Starry Night Over The Rhone (1888) by Vincent van Gogh
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The Starry Night Over The Rhone (1888) by Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh is revered as one of the greatest Post-Impressionist artists. His unique brushwork, contoured lines and forms, rich colors, and stroke-based style have greatly influenced expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh’s paintings became very popular in the twentieth century after his death. Some of his works have fetched colossal sums of money in auctions around the world, such as the Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet that sold for $83 million in 1990 (Bailey, 2022). Despite his posthumous popularity, van Gogh was not a successful artist when he was alive and is believed to have sold only one painting in his life, the Red Vineyards at Arles (Marder, 2018). As a result, he was a depressed and troubled artist. His widely published letters reveal how sad and tormented he was, which contributed to the mythologized image of a tortured artist that pushed his popularity to great heights. This popularity was extended to his amazing paintings that are now considered the greatest Post-Impressionist work by many art lovers. This paper explores one of his greatest paintings, The Starry Night Over The Rhone.
The Starry Night Over The Rhone Analysis
The Starry Night Over The Rhone is one of van Gogh greatest paintings. Unfortunately, it is usually overlooked for his other great paintings like The Starry Night (1889) that is considered by many his best work. The main reason people prefer The Starry Night is because Van Gogh painted it during his twelve month stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, which corroborated with the mythologized image of a tortured artist that people loved about him. However, The Starry Night Over The Rhone played a critical role in painting The Starry Night. According to Carouthers (2021), Van Gogh preferred working from observation. However, he was not allowed to paint in his room, and so he was forced to create The Starry Night from the image of the night sky in his studio without reference.
Although this account proves that he may have had a photographic memory, the fact that he named his masterpiece after his earlier work The Starry Night Over The Rhone reveals that he may have drawn inspiration from it. The Starry Night Over The Rhone was drawn from observation and at night, while The Starry Night was observed very early in the morning before sunrise. Yet, Van Gogh did not name it “The Starry Sunrise”, which is a testament to the connection between the two arts. Moreover, he used the same style of yellow stars dotted on blue black sky that he utilized in The Starry Night (Rhone). Lastly, he incorporated a small village in The Starry Night which he drew from memory since the landscape overlooking the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum did not have a village (Zelazko, n.d.). This style of incorporating foreign elements in an observable piece is a characteristic of his ear...