The painting has been praised for its use of color and brushstrokes, as well as its emotional power. The Starry Night is often seen as a symbol of van Gogh’s hope and resilience despite his struggles with mental illness.
Vincent van Gogh paintings: from Starry Night to Sunflowers, the painter’s top 10 artworks
From sunflowers to starry nights, Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated names in Western art history.
In his lifetime he’s thought to have painted 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings – many of which were created in the last two years of his life. With his work hanging in the world’s most prestigious museums and galleries, including the National Gallery, the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay and the Met, and with his 1888 painting, Verger avec cyprès, going for $117 million at auction last year, there’s no denying Van Gogh’s lasting impact on the art world.
With the skies becoming increasingly darker, there’s never been a better time to take in his transportative works. Here we’ve rounded up 10 of Van Gogh’s best paintings.
Potato Eaters
Potato Eaters was Van Gogh’s first major work and it was apparently one of the pieces that he was most proud of, because of its authenticity. His aim was to represent the harsh reality of country life: the peasants are painted in earthy tones with rough faces and bony hands, to illustrate the hard labour they endure every day.
Café Terrace at Night
(Alamy Stock Photo)
Despite being painted more than 130 years ago, this café still exists in France and has since been renamed the Café Van Gogh. This artwork marks the first time Van Gogh’s famous post-impressionist star-filled sky is seen in one of his pieces, and it’s believed the work was painted on the ground, in person, rather than from memory. While the artwork doesn’t bear his signature, it’s widely known to be Van Gogh’s, as he mentions Café Terrace at Night in a number of his letters.
Introduction to Vincent Van Gogh
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Vincent Van Gogh in the history of art. He is one of the most famous and influential artists of all time, with a unique and instantly recognizable style. His paintings are among the most popular and iconic in the world. “Starry Night” is perhaps his most famous work, and it is certainly one of the most beautiful and stunning paintings ever created.
Van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherlands. He did not begin painting until he was in his late twenties after he had moved to France and been exposed to the work of Impressionist painters like Claude Monet. He was largely self-taught, although he briefly attended an art academy. He developed his own distinctive style, characterized by bold colors and thick brushstrokes.
Van Gogh’s life was plagued by mental illness, and he struggled with poverty and rejection throughout his career. Despite this, he produced an incredible body of work, totaling more than 2,000 paintings and drawings during his lifetime. He died tragically young, at the age of 37, but his legacy has lived on through his timeless artwork.
Background of The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh is one of the most famous artists of all time. His paintings are instantly recognizable and his work has been endlessly reproduced and discussed. One of his most famous paintings is The Starry Night, which he completed in 1889 while living in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France.
The Starry Night is an oil painting on a canvas measuring just over two feet by three feet. It shows a view of the village of Saint-Remy under a dazzling night sky. The stars are rendered as white dots against a deep blue background, and the moon is a crescent shape peeking out from behind some clouds. The village is shown as a cluster of dark buildings beneath the bright sky.
Van Gogh was fascinated by the night sky and often painted it in his work. He once said that “the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” This is certainly true of The Starry Night, which is one of van Gogh’s most beautiful and atmospheric paintings.
Color Palette and Techniques Used in The Starry Night
In “The Starry Night,” Vincent Van Gogh used a unique and striking color palette to depict the night sky. He applied thick layers of paint to the canvas, using a variety of brushstrokes to create a sense of movement and energy. The colors he used were mostly blues and greens, with occasional pops of yellow and white.
To create the illusion of stars shining in the night sky, Van Gogh used a technique called impasto. He applied thick layers of paint to the canvas, using a variety of brushstrokes to create a sense of movement and energy. By using light colors against a dark background, he was able to create a bright and sparkly effect.
Van Gogh’s use of color and brushwork in “The Starry Night” creates a feeling of awe and wonder. The painting is truly beautiful, and it’s no wonder it has become one of the most iconic images in art history.
Vincent Van Gogh and His Love For Painting The Stars
Posted at 14:31h in Blog by Mitali Somaiya 0 Comments
“This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night (1889). The window to which he refers was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he sought respite from his emotional suffering while continuing to make art….
It’s not hard to see why Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night is art history’s most famous celestial scene—and one of the world’s most beloved paintings to boot (the phenomenon of the immersive Van Gogh Art experience and Paint & Sip nights seems to prove people want not just to look at it, but feel the experience and to be inside it, too).
Widely termed as Van Gogh’s magnum opus, this night star’s painting depicts the view outside his sanatorium room window at night, but actually, it was painted from a memory during the day. While perhaps this is a less romantic vision, Van Gogh indeed had a separate painting studio at the Saint-Paule-de-Mausole, where he worked during the day.
Van gogh may have been considered as lonely and tortured, but he was anything but disconnected from contemporary conversations about the latest developments in the arts. His discursive letters to his friends Paul Gaugin and Émile Bernard discussed the latest color theories, including the principles of color contrasts that Van Gogh derived from his hero, the Neoclassical artist Eugène Delacroix.
Van Gogh made The Starry Night at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he had voluntarily admitted himself following a manic episode in which he infamously mutilated his own ear. Many have interpreted the painting as Van Gogh’s contemplation of his own mortality—the cypress tree was a common death symbol, and the artist often affiliated the stars with the afterlife. In one letter to his brother Theo, he wrote, “But the sight of the stars always makes me dream… Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.”
But while the artist’s masterpiece certainly lends itself to emotive interpretations, it was also highly considered one of his most productive career periods. The Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum was a progressive institution in which patients were encouraged to spend time in nature, and the artist’s brother ensured his brother was given a studio and ample time to paint. There, in the shrouded safety of the asylum, Van Gogh experienced some of his most brilliant—and peaceful—moments. He painted his famous Irises within his first several days there, and he would go on to paint The Starry Night over just a few days in June of 1889. I n fact, when Van Gogh painted Cafe Terrace, the stars were his inspiration for a ‘paint night’ like setting with dreamy stars.
Did you know that one meaning that Starry Night is supposed to hold was biblical, where the eleven stars were seen as a reference to Joseph. With a possible reference to Genesis 37:9, Van Gogh hoped that he would gain acceptance from his peers as an artist—similar to how Joseph did after a hard life. Beautiful, isn’t it?
For Van Gogh, color was a vehicle for expressing emotion, and the vibrantly hued canvases of his late career succeed in large part to the availability of new hues in the paint market. It is the intensity of light in those colors on the canvas that gives The Starry Night its unique glow. The contrasts between dashes of paint create an optical effect known as luminance, in which the brain experiences simultaneous sensory responses. Simply put—one part of the brain focuses on light and motion, but sees color less distinctly. Another part of the brain, however, will grasp each of the contrasting colors. Van Gogh’s bold, light-filled brushstrokes provide both of these experiences, creating the flickering sense for which the painting is so famous.
With so many extraordinary meanings behind Van Goghs famous pieces, it only encourages one to paint their own version of his stunning masterpieces, to pay a tribute to his legacy. With our beginner painting Van Gogh ‘paint by number kits’ , it is possible for anyone to create an easy canvas painting that represents their memory of Van Gogh, as he will always have a special place in all of our hearts.
