Dear Fellow Art Lovers,
As the remains of summer slowly slide into the wood-smoke infused slumber of autumn, I find myself anticipating the crackle of leaves under-foot and the glowing colours of fall foliage. This led me to think of paintings like Monet’s 1873 “Autumn Effect at Argenteuil,” or Van Gogh’s painting from eleven years later, “Avenue of Poplars in Autumn.” I then began to consider the changes in the use of colour from impressionism to post-impressionism, and Van Gogh’s own dramatic shift in his use of colour after his move to Paris in 1886. Of the four artists who usually garner the title “Post Impressionist” – Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh – it’s Van Gogh who seems to have most directly found a way of expressing how nature affected his inner world through the use of striking colour and unique, emotionally expressive brush-work. So, when a newsletter reader got in touch to say, “[I] have always been told of the beauty of [Van Gogh’s] work and would love to hear a further description of his work in more detail,” I decided August’s belated “word picture” should be one of my favourite Van Gogh paintings, “Starry Night” – and of course Star agreed.
he painting depicts a nocturnal scene. A small village in a mountainous landscape under a waxing crescent moon and star-filled sky. Our view is from above, as though we are looking over the dormant village from a higher vantage point, perhaps a hilltop just outside the village, where we stand in darkness maybe at the edge of a cluster of trees. In the foreground, about 1/4 of the way in from the left edge of the canvas, we see the top of a tree with dense foliage, and a column-like, symmetrical shape. It appears to be an Italian cypress tree whose upper trunk starts at the bottom of the canvas and whose tip reaches to just an inch or so below the top of the canvas. This dominant cypress is made up of strong, vertical, black, lines, some strokes of dark green, and dark blue, and a few flecks of white. Next to the largest cypress are two or so shorter cypress trees, which only rise 1/3rd of the way up the height of the canvas. To the left of this cluster of cypresses, there is vegetation including a few treetops at the bottom left, which are made of brighter green circles; these circles offset the circle of the moon in the upper right of the canvas – which we will come to later. To the right of the cluster of cypresses are more trees and houses; these are all cut off by the bottom edge of the canvas. In the next plane of the painting, the middle distance, there is a village. In the lower right centre of the village is a church, with a tall, thin spire that stretches into the night sky. The body of the church is pale blue outlined in black, giving the impression of a white building reflecting the cool hues of the night sky. Surrounding the church are many houses outlined in black. Because we are viewing the village from above, we see mostly the rooftops of the houses. These roofs are pale blue with some diagonal darker lines suggesting roof tiles. To the left of the church is one house with a dull red roof, which stands out due to the blues around it. The few walls of houses we can see are painted in deeper blue tones. Some of the houses have small yellow squares painted on them, implying light coming from within through windows. Beyond the village is a forest made up of several rows of trees which create a sense of distance as they diminish in size closer to the bottom of the mountains. These trees are black, blue, and green circles, looking like the shadows of round hay bales or sheep backs. Beyond this forest is a row of shorter mountains painted mid to light blue, and rising above these are the black outlines of mostly dome shaped mountains, filled in with dark blues and some greens. The tallest and most distant mountain, at the far right edge of the canvas, is black at the top with darker blue beneath. The mountains to the left of the foreground cypress are painted in lighter blues, suggesting the light is coming from the left side of the canvas. The dark lines that Van Gogh uses to paint the foot of the mountains and the houses suggest a horizontal line, and a strong vertical line is created by the cypress in the foreground. These two lines, along with the small diagonals created by the mountains, and foliage of the cypress, emphasise the sky which completely consumes the upper 2/3rds of the canvas. This solid composition creates the perfect framework for a dynamic play of lines in the emotionally energised sky. The background of the night sky is composed of a few narrow black strokes interspersed amongst mostly marine-blue, longer strokes, with slightly lighter blue strokes moving our gaze from the left to the right of the canvas. The bright waxing crescent moon commands the upper right of the canvas. The moon, which due to its size appears to be near the horizon, is surrounded by a large circle of small, strokes of light yellow, that extend outward into lighter blues mixed with white. These circling strokes give the moon a hazy glow. Eleven stars of varying sizes and brightnesses shimmer across the rest of the sky. One of the brightest stars is in the upper far left of the canvas. This star is composed of a tan dot at its centre that is surrounded by light blue strokes with a few flashes of white. This contrast between the blue and white makes the star appear to vibrate with luminosity. To the left of the cypress tree, just below the horizontal centre of the canvas, are two more stars, the small one made up mostly of white, circular strokes. Its larger neighbour is composed of a central tan dot surrounded by white, that melts into yellow and blue, again creating the impression of gleaming star light. To the right of the cypress, and along the upper edge of the canvas, are three more stars with tan or yellow centres, and emanating from these centres are short soft blue, circular strokes, imparting a turbulent flow of light around these stars. The most striking element of this night sky starts a quarter of the way down the left of the canvas. It is a giant nebula flowing downwards toward the left centre of the picture, behind the cypress tree, moving to swirl into a large circle at the centre of the painting, and then unwinding dramatically downward, and up again, and twirling around into another smaller circle at the upper, centre right of the composition. This nebula is composed mainly of dashes of pale blue, and white, and longer yellow strokes with touches of green; this swirl of activity takes up a quarter of the central portion of the canvas. Below the nebula to the right of the cypress tree are two more of the eleven stars. The upper of these two stars is smaller with a yellow centre surrounded by soft green and blue. The largest of all the stars is located midway between the top and bottom of the cypress. It is composed of a small yellow centre surrounded with short white strokes; this very well may be the morning star, Venus. Undulating between the mountains and the sky there are white thin strokes interspersed with pale blue that create a brilliant glow on the horizon line. This sheen of early dawn runs horizontally along the full length of the canvas, except for where it is obscured by the cypress.
Van Gogh has created a sense of vastness in the “Starry Night” by overlapping picture-planes, and by making elements of the foreground intrude on the far background, for example the cypress and the church spire. He represents the extensiveness of the sky by putting together large and smaller elements, on the same picture plane, distant stars, the large moon, and morning star all sit together. He further enhances the movement of the sky by introducing flowing brushstrokes that are of varying sizes, but circle in the same direction. The moon and stars light up the sky, but they do not seem to cast their brilliant light much on the village or mountains below. The darkness of the bottom third of the painting is emphasised by many dark outlines, and simplified shapes, painted in with quick, short brushstrokes. This almost colouring-book quality gives an immediacy to the image. And, a layer of emotional urgency is added to the work. by the fact that Van Gogh has thickly applied paint to the canvas, without putting on a base coat, so the raw canvas is visible in small spots, and If we look closely we can see brush strokes in the paint. Van Gogh has not attempted to conceal the hand of the artist. The predominant colours in the painting are blue and yellow, as contrasting colours they add another level of tension and energy to the canvas, and the subtler oranges and greens in the painting similarly play off one another. Unlike Van Gogh’s sunflowers or irises, this night sky may, therefore, owe a bit more to turbulent imagination, and exploration of style, than to painting directly from nature. As Theo, Van Gogh’s brother, who was a gallery manager in Paris and a talented connoisseur of contemporary art, wrote to Vincent:
“I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases, like the village in the moonlight… but I feel the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things.” (October 1889)
In this work, Van Gogh does appear to have veered from his usual determination to paint en plein air, and instead has drawn from memory and imagination, a technique more in line with his former housemate, Paul Gauguin. Like Theo, Vincent also understood the painting to be an exercise in deliberate stylisation, telling his brother, “These are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of ancient woodcuts” ( c. 20 September 1889). Similar to his friends Bernard and Gauguin, Van Gogh was experimenting with a style inspired in part by medieval woodcuts, with their thick outlines and simplified forms.
On the other hand, The Starry Night evidences Van Gogh’s extended observation of the night sky. After leaving his brother’s home in Paris in 1888 for more rural areas in southern France, Van Gogh was able to spend hours contemplating the stars without interference from gas or electric city street lights, which were increasingly in use by the late nineteenth century. “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big”, c. 31 May – 6 June 1889). As he wrote to his sister Willemien van Gogh from Arles,
It often seems to me that the night is even more richly coloured than the day, coloured with the most intense violets, blues, and greens. If you look carefully, you’ll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without labouring the point, it’s clear to paint a starry sky it’s not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black. (14 September 1888)
Many months before he painted The Starry Night in late June or early July of 1889, Van Gogh had already tried out the idea of painting the full night sky in Starry Night over the Rhône (1888, oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4 inches). This is an image of the French city of Arles at night, in which two lovers stand on a bridge lit by gaslight under a dark sky. In this work, the gas lights of the city seem to dominate and dim the night sky. The two lovers who were originally intended to take up the foreground of the picture became two tiny figures on a bridge. Unlike “Starry Night”, this first painting was completed outdoors with the help of gas lamplight. Thus, in Van Gogh’s first “starry night” the incandescence of modernity appears to dim the ancient brilliance of the night sky.
However, the second “Starry Night” was created under much different circumstances. It was painted after the dramatic end to Van Gogh’s short-lived collaboration with Paul Gauguin in Arles in 1888 and the infamous breakdown during which Van Gogh mutilated part of his own ear, and during his subsequent convalescence at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum near the village of Saint-Rémy. Here Van Gogh was encouraged to paint both outdoors and in, though he rarely ventured more than a few hundred yards from the asylum’s walls. He was even given a room separate from his private quarters which served as a studio. There is controversy as to whether Van Gogh painted the second Starry night in this studio or in his private room, looking from the window which had a wide-ranging view over fields and mountains. There are objects included in the painting which were not visible from his private room’s window, including the cypress trees and the church steeple, which it is suggested by some art historians resembles the spire of a church from Van Gogh’s native Netherlands, rather than of southern France. Regardless of its accuracy to the detail of a certain view, or of one particular night’s sky, Van Gogh has in “Starry Night” created a picture which pulls us into its swirling, dramatic atmosphere, and holds us captivated, seemingly half in a dream and half in waking reverie. This is the wonder of much of Van Gogh’s later work: he is able to immediately draw our attention with his astonishing command of the vivid colours developed during the middle of the nineteenth century, like chromium yellow, and his ability to convey a feeling of energetic wonder through his observation and lively brush-work.
For more details and discussion on this painting and Van Gogh’s work in general, I recommend you click on the following links:
And Star has suggested I add this link, because she likes having this song sung to her:
Star also wants to let her fellow dog friends know that her belated August museum recommendation is “The Weald and Downland Living Museum” in west Sussex, where all dogs are welcome, not just service dogs: https://www.wealddown.co.uk
Star says this museum is a very paws-on experience, with lots of amazing old buildings that your people can touch. Dogs can sniff their way through the gardens, past the nice picnic spot near the pond with its extremely interesting resident ducks. A dog visiting in the late summer may even be able to find an unauthorised apple or fig snack on the ground in the grounds around the reconstructed houses. On certain weekends, there are even opportunities for your people to have hands-on learning about historic crafts from lacemaking, to making dyes for wool, and even how to make a chair from huge pieces of log. The food in the cafe is yummy – we are not asking how Star knows this – and there are dog bowls with water dotted through out the grounds for thirsty dogs on hotter days.
Until next time we wish you all the delights of hazy September sunshine, and the morning touch of autumn chill.
Kindest Regards,
Lisa and Star