How van Gogh painted a night sky outdoors, in the dark

He went out and painted it. This is the night picture van Gogh made on the bank of the Rhône at Arles in September 1888 — the one where the colours are what he could actually see in the dark, rather than what he remembered of it. The more famous swirling Starry Night came later, painted indoors at the asylum in Saint-Rémy the following year, and by daylight.

The difference is the whole point. This is observation. The other one is memory.

What he was chasing

Van Gogh arrived in Arles on 8th February 1888 and, as the Musée d’Orsay’s record puts it, was “constantly preoccupied with the representation of night effects” from the moment he got there. The idea took most of a year to catch.

The museum quotes him circling it in letter after letter. In April, to his brother Theo: “I need a starry night with cypresses or maybe above a field of ripe wheat.” In June, to the painter Émile Bernard: “But when shall I ever paint the Starry Sky, this painting that keeps haunting me.” In September, to his sister: “Often it seems to me night is even more richly coloured than day.”

That month he finally did it — twice. First a corner of night sky behind a lit café, in Café Terrace at Night, now at the Kröller-Müller. Then after came the river.

What you are actually looking at

Two rival light sources, which is the picture’s real subject.

Along the far bank, the gas lights of Arles burn an intense orange and lay long broken reflections down the water. Above, the stars. The town is new light, installed and municipal; the sky is old light. Van Gogh has painted them competing on the same surface, and the water is where they meet.

Orsay names the blues he built it from: Prussian blue, ultramarine and cobalt. Prussian blue is the same pigment that made The Great Wave possible in Japan sixty years earlier — a synthetic that gave painters a blue that neither faded nor went muddy.

And at the bottom edge, easily missed: a couple, walking arm in arm along the bank. They are the reason the picture reads as calm rather than cosmic. Orsay’s notice draws the contrast directly — the Saint-Rémy version is turbulent, this one is serene, “an atmosphere reinforced by the presence of a couple of lovers at the bottom of the canvas”.

How it was made

Painting outdoors after dark is an absurd technical problem: you cannot see your own palette. The colours in this canvas were chosen in conditions where distinguishing cobalt from ultramarine by eye is close to impossible, which is part of why the result is so strange and so convincing at once.

Reading. The picturesque story — that he worked under candles fixed to his hat brim — is widely repeated and does not come from the museum record. What the record supports is simpler and stranger: a painter who wanted night colour badly enough to go and get it, and who wrote to three different people about the difficulty before managing it.

The paint is handled far more evenly here than in the Saint-Rémy picture. There is no whirlpool. The stars are laid on as discrete bursts, the reflections as long vertical strokes — which is why, at high magnification, this canvas rewards a different kind of looking: not the sculpted turbulence people expect of van Gogh, but a patient, almost pointillist description of light on moving water.

Why it mattered then

It was seen. This canvas went to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1889, catalogue number 272 — hung in public while van Gogh was alive, which is not the fate most people assume for his work.

He sent it to Theo shortly before 2nd May 1889. After Theo’s death it passed to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who kept it until 1905, and it then spent seventeen years with the Dutch collector Bas Veth before an Amsterdam auction in 1922 sent it on again.

It reached the French state in 1975, given by M. and Mme Robert Kahn-Sriber in memory of M. and Mme Fernand Moch — but as a donation sous réserve d’usufruit, a gift with the donors’ lifetime use retained. Orsay only took possession in 1995, when that reservation ended. The painting was promised to the public for twenty years before it arrived.

What isn’t known

• The exact night. The record gives September 1888 and no date. He was painting a river under stars, not logging an observation.
• How he actually managed the light. No account in the museum record explains the practical method. The hat-and-candles story is folklore until someone produces the source.
• Which stars. The sky here is recognisably a night sky rather than a diagram; unlike the Saint-Rémy canvas, it has attracted far less astronomical detective work, and Orsay makes no claim about it.
• Who the couple are. Nobody knows, and it is likely nobody in particular.

The picture that made van Gogh famous is the other one — the asylum, the cypress, the swirl. This is the one he chased for seven months and painted standing in the dark, and it is the better piece of looking.

Own Starry Night Over the Rhône in 4K →
See the original at Musée d'Orsay →