Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night Over The Rhone

Starry Nights
Most people know Vincent Willem van Gogh, a Post-Impressionist painter in the 1800s, as the maker of The Starry Night. Fewer people, however, are aware that van Gogh first created The Starry Night Over the Rhone, which he painted during a happier period of his life. While both pieces employ the same style and portray a similar scene, the feelings evoked are entirely different. Despite the differences in mood, one cannot argue that van Gogh did not prove that “putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky,” for both his Starry Night paintings vividly capture the burning lights of the sky. Van Gogh saw the sky the way that we all should see the sky, and used “more arbitrary use of color to express [himself] more forcefully.”
In The Starry Night, van Gogh struggles with intense emotions of isolation and sadness. The heavy brush strokes and color scheme dominated by a looming dark tree indicate a sense of foreboding. The prominent feeling
While van Gogh employed the same technique of impasto, the piling up of paint for texture, Starry Night Over the Rhone’s brush strokes do not convey the same frantic sense of motion that is seen is The Starry Night. The theme of Starry Night Over the Rhone is intimate, with a romantic air. The town is alive, the couple is alone, and the sky is alit with fire. The vast expanses of sky and water hint of endless possibilities. Starry NIght Over the Rhone captures a single moment, and even now, almost 130 years later, I look at this painting and feel as if I could step right in, watch the stars glowing, and see my face reflected alongside the lights on the water. Starry Night Over the Rhone incorporates realistic daydreams with a sky that is perhaps too perfect, but it only adds to its