19th Century Art - Vincent Van Gogh
Starry Night, 1889, Oil on Canvas
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One of the rare visionary pictures inspired by a religious mood, it is characteristic of Van Gogh as a representation of a transfigured night sky.
An earlier version painted in Arles is more soberly lyrical, although prompted by a haunting desire to express his aspiration towards infinity in nature; there he added to the enchantment of the tiny stars the reflections of the city lights in the water and two lovers in the foreground. He dreamed also of a picture of the starry night "with a group of living figures of our own crowd".
When he returns to his theme at Saint-Remy, after a period of crisis and religious hallucinations, the pressure of feeling, with its hidden tendencies and content, forces the bounds of the visible and determines the fantastic projections, the great coiling spiral nebula, the magnified stars, and the incredible orange moon, with the light between its horns--a confused memory, perhaps, of an eclipse (he quoted Hugo: "God is a lighthouse in eclipse"), or an attempt to unite sun and moon into one figure; the tremendous flame-formed cypresses, the dark earthly, vertical counterpart of the dragon nebula, may also be an invention here, transferred from other landscapes, as a vague symbol of a human striving. The whole owes its immediacy and power to the impulsive, torrential flow of brush-strokes, the release of feeling along great paths. Every object and region has its own direction and rhythm, which contribute to the mobility of the vast whole. Van Gogh does not surrender passively to his exciting vision; he is able to detach himself as an artist and to seek an articulation which increases the emotional charge by opposing to its obvious effects other elements of contrast. Thus the town in the foreground is drawn in short, distinct, horizontal strokes, unlike the prevailing curves above. Its straight, angular lines were a correction of a first draft, in which these buildings, too, quivered like the rest of the space, in wavy forms. The small yellow lights in the buildings are all square or rectangular in shape, in contract to the stars above. The thin church spire, its tip crossing the horizon, as the cypress top crosses the nebula, was another afterthought, replacing a series of redundant cypresses which echoed the passion of the dominant trees. It has been suggested that there is a possible element of an apocalyptic fantasy within this work.
