People often mix this painting up with Van Gogh's other, more famous starry sky. This one came first, and unlike its swirling cousin, it shows a real place he actually stood in.
What you're looking at
Van Gogh painted this view of the Rhône river at Arles by night in September 1888, working outdoors after dark. The new gas lamps of the town burn gold across the water in thick, vertical brushstrokes, a moored boat sits at anchor with its mast doubled in the current, and a couple walks arm in arm along the sandy bank in the foreground, the only people Van Gogh placed anywhere in the scene.
The sky he named in a letter, and the painting people confuse it with
Overhead, Van Gogh painted a constellation he identified himself in a letter to his brother Theo as the Great Bear, what's commonly known today as the Big Dipper. He worked at night by the light of a gas lamp fixed to his hat so he could see his own palette while painting outdoors on the riverbank.
This is not the same painting as The Starry Night, the swirling, dreamlike sky now at MoMA in New York. That more famous painting came about nine months later and was painted from memory and imagination, inside an asylum. This one, over the Rhône, is the earlier, calmer painting, made from direct observation of a real night sky above a real town, and it hangs today in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
One detail to look for
Look at the gaslights reflected in the water. Van Gogh paints them as thick, separate strokes of yellow and orange rippling straight down into the river, distinct from the softer blue brushwork of the water and sky around them.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, 72.5 x 92 cm. Shop the canvas print.