Starry Night Over the Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh.
We are faced with an embrace, the embrace that Van Gogh pays to the landscape that appears before his eyes one evening in September 1888 on the banks of the Rhone in Arles in Provence. An embrace that envelops the entire universe, that of men, his fellow citizens who will soon favor, failing to understand it, his internment in an asylum and that of a sky full of stars, those stars that, as the painter wrote, did dreaming so much that he would have liked to visit them.
And basically it is so, with this painting Vincent is as if he included in a single great breath all the inhabitants of his city and all the stars of the firmament. His heart, his feeling, his soul were so big that they went beyond his body, his easel, that same couple of villagers who happened to be on the riverside in front of him, so big that they met the infinite space, the constellation of the Ursa Major with the bright stars that we recognize in the Big Dipper and still others, millions and millions of bright gems scattered in the sky and throbbing with life.
The great luministic impact in the painting derives above all from the gas lamps placed on the bank of the Rhone and from their spectacular golden yellow reflections on the river's waters.
We are faced with a great masterpiece that is a vision of the world transfigured by a human feeling so strong, unique and powerful that it plunges us into the mystery and enchantment of beauty and life.
Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Arles in Provence in February 1888 with a fixed thought: to paint the night. The Dutch painter loved the stars, he loved the night so much that in one of his numerous letters he wrote how the night appeared even more colorful than the day.
On 29 September Vincent writes to his brother Theo that he has finally made the long-awaited canvas with a starry sky. The painter describes the painting and underlines the difference between the representation of yellow gas lamps with their violent red gold to green bronze reflections and that of the great bear which shines instead of a much more tenuous pink green.
(You can find Vincent's letters to his brother here: amzn.to/33nE5KH)
For Van Gogh, therefore, there is a clear contrast between the strength of artificial lights and the more delicate one of the stars which, in his letters, he had compared to precious stones.
The painting can be divided and read into three parts.
In the foreground we notice a strip of land. Van Gogh had placed the easel in a spot that has been concreted today. The position is raised by a few meters above the surface of the waters of the Rhone. In the foreground, on the right, a couple peeps out, two Arlesians holding arm in arm and taking two steps; they suddenly seem to raise their heads: they have seen the painter with his easel. The woman's dress shows the only red stain in the painting.
Already from this area of the picture we can see the very material brushstroke spread by Van Gogh through juxtaposed segments of color. Here the alternation of cobalt blue, greens and browns prevails.
The second part of the painting is that occupied by the waters of the Rhone and the urban profile. The absolute protagonists of this area are the gas lamps.
Van Gogh traces the long river with long linear brushstrokes as a sort of seamless arch that passes from one side of the Rhone to the other across the bridge, with street lamps placed on both banks. The outlines of the city are barely hinted at and we can see some churches that stand out with their bell towers. The surface of the water is rendered with horizontal brushstrokes especially of Prussian blue and touches of cobalt. The reflections of the gas lamps with brushstrokes of yellow, orange and green.
The starry sky is the third portion of the painting and is characterized by very large brushstrokes that appear to have been spread with particular serenity by the painter. The sky is painted with cobalt blue in the areas illuminated by the stars, especially the seven that make up the great chariot.
According to some studies, the position of the stars of the Big Dipper that we find in the picture would correspond precisely to that of a night between 20 and 30 September 1888 around 10.30 pm, consistently with what is documented in the painter's letters. This confirms to us how Van Gogh, while pursuing an art with strong emotional tints, started from the objective naturalistic datum.
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21 июл 2024
