Starry Night Visual Analysis

Analysis of the Painting

Foremost, the humanity represented by Starry Night over the Rhone is much brighter, as evidenced not only by the brightness of the windows, but the depths at which they are reflected on the river. Furthermore, the darkness of the sky is brighter than in The Starry Night, which, in the latter painting, is a symbol for depression. In the distance, the lighter blue is seen by some critics as the first signs of morning. It is important to note that here the optimism comes from the sky, not from the town.

The Painting
It is differentiated from other Vincent’s Starry Night paintings because it contains human beings it captures the gas lighting in Arles at night and an illuminated sky. The gas lighting reflections are clearly

Rhone – that which rolls – is an important river running through Arles. Its importance and the beauty at night maybe allured the artist to illustrate it with oil on his canvas.

Van Gogh has never tried to depict scene in their natural conditions. He always twisted the scenes and added imaginary colors and portions to the scene to get the exact impact he willed for. Adding artificial color to the image was a new idea in his time and Van Gogh used it very well in most of his works. Here, as he described in one of his letters to his brother, the depiction consists just a friction of realism while everything else is impressionism or post-impressionism which he acquire in all of his later works. The colors of the sky, water and land in foreground almost looks the same when instead the real landscape had the colors of aquamarine, royal blue and mauve respectively. It is a mark of his artistic understanding about the scene to make it more soothing to eyes. The position of the stars in the sky is formative as the stars in the middle are the members of the constellation called Ursa Major or the Great Bear as artist mentioned it in his letter. Though, in reality, by looking at the real place the Ursa Major constellation is not situated at the place artist has depicted. Maybe we can call it Artificial