Van Gogh The Starry Night Painting

The Starry Night was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. Widely hailed as Van Gogh's magnum opus, the painting depicts the view outside his sanatorium room window at night, although it was painted from memory during the day. Since 1941 it has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh has risen to the peak of artistic achievements. Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, the aftermath of his work is enormous. Starry Night is one of the most well known images in modern culture as well as being one of the most replicated and sought after prints. From Don McLean's song 'Starry, Starry Night' (Based on the Painting), to the endless number of merchandise products sporting this image, it is nearly impossible to shy away from this amazing painting.

The center part shows the village of Saint-Rémy under a swirling sky, in a view from the asylum towards north. The Alpilles far to the right fit to this view, but there is little rapport of the actual scene with the intermediary hills which seem to be derived from a different part of the surroundings, south of the asylum. The cypress tree to the left was added into the composition. Of note is the fact van Gogh had already, during his time in Arles, repositioned Ursa Major from the north to the south in his painting Starry Night Over the Rhone.

Van Gogh Wheat Field with Crows Painting

Wheat Field with Crows was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1890. This painting is believed to be the last work of Van Gogh. Writing of this picture shortly before his suicide, Van Gogh conveyed something of its tragic mood."Returning there, I set to work. The brush almost fell from my hands...I had no difficulty in expressing sadness and extreme solitude". The singular format of the canvas is matched by the vista itself, a field opening out from the foreground by way of three diverging paths. It creates a disquieting situation for the spectator, who is held in doubt before the great horizon and cannot, moreover, reach it on any of the roads before him; these end blindly in the field or run out of the picture.

The familiar perspective network of the open field is now inverted; the lines converge toward the foreground from the horizon, as if space had suddenly lost its focus and all things turned aggressively upon the beholder. The blue sky and the yellow fields pull away from each other with disturbing violence; across their boundry, a flock of black crows advances toward the unsteady foreground. And here in this pathetic disarray, we discover a powerful counteraction of the artist. In contrast to the turbulence of the brushwork, the whole space is of a primordial breadth and simplicity. The colors in their frequency have been matched inversely to the largeness and stability of their areas.

The artist seems to count: one is the unique blue of the sky - unity, breadth, the ultimate resolution; two is the complementary yellow of the divided, unstable masses of growing wheat; three is the red of the diverging roads that lead nowhere; four is the complementary green of the untrodden grass of these roads; and as then n of the series there is the endless progression of the zigzag crows, the figures of fated that come from the far horizon. As a man in distress counts and enumerates to hold on things securely or to fight a compulsion, Van Gogh in his extremity of anguish creates an arithmetical order to resist disintegration. He makes an intense effort to control, to organize. Elemental contrasts become the essential appearances; and in this simple order, the separated parts are united by echoes of color, without changing the larger forces of the whole. Two green clouds are reflections, however dimmed, of the green of the roads.

Van Gogh Almond Blossom Painting

Almond Blossom was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1890. This painting was immediately before one of his attacks; "My work was going well," he informed his brother, "the last canvas of branches in blossom - you will see that it is perhaps the best, the most patiently worked thing I had done, painted with calm and with greater firmness of touch.

And the next day, down like a brute." Poised between lucidity and desperation, this lacework of light and color is kept aloft by the confidence Van Gogh had acquired in the previous two or three years and the sheer technical finesse now at his command. At the back of his mind may well have been a blossom study from a Japanese print, such as the work by Kunisada acquired at some point by the two brothers for their collection.

In the "firmness of touch" of Almond Blossom, we see the culmination of years of intensive, questioning draftsmanship; and in the openness and buoyancy of the design, we sense the optimism that the artist - despite his insurmountable condition - could magnificently, magically translate into paint.

Van Gogh Fishing Boats On The Beach Painting

Fishing Boats On The Beach was painted by Van Gogh in 1888.  He has described with joy his visit to the Mediterranean shore near Arles at the fishing village of Sainte-Maries, where he painted and drew for several days. It was a new world for him, and he responded to it with his usual eaterness and excitement.

In the picture of the fishing boats, two different kinds of vision are united in one work: nature seen as light and airy, in countless tones of high-keyed color, ever-changing and vibrant through universal contrast; on the other hand, man's objects, the boats, drawn precisely and painted in flat airless tones of primary color. The pearly softness of the seascape becomes a setting for the hard, firmly compartmented colors of the boats. But these boats, disposed along the beach beside one another, overlapping and with crossing masts, make an intricate network of spots and colored lines, which participate in the unstable airy shiftings of the natural tones, in the irregular patterns of the seashore and the waves, and the vast currents of the shapeless clouds.

This network of the boats is a typical pattern of Van Gogh's vision; it had appeared already in his Dutch period in the drawings of trees, and as in those early works the branchings of the boat are drawn with unflagging devotion to the detailed individual shapes. The color ranges from the frank primary hues of the boats to tones of iridescence in the sky, with delicate blues, greens, and lavenders, and, on the beach, nameless sandy tones that are blendings of cool, neutralized yellow, tan, and brown. Just as the painting is Impressionist in the subtle discriminations and pairings of cool and warm, so in the application of the paint, there is a corresponding span from thin, flecked, and transparent touches to thick and matte.

Van Gogh The Bedroom At Arles

Van Gogh The Bedroom At Arles Painting , 1888  was an expression of 'perfect rest', or 'sleep in general'. The bright, cheerful little room has become a field of rapid convergences, sharp angles, and contrasts of high color. The perspective vision of the walls and bed is as exciting as one of his deep landscapes, where we are carried headlong to the horizon. But in such a view with 'a rushing series of lines, furrows rising high on the canvas', Van Gogh found an expression of 'calmness, of great peace.' These surprising reactions permit us to see the spontaneous intensification of movement in his rendering of things. For his high-strung nature, the most relaxed perceptions were already charged and restless. But his feelingof repose in paintings so full of movement is also the outcome of a kind of cathartic process; by projecting movement into nature, he is relieved of tensions and wins a real peace.

In The Bedroom at Arles this movement is sustained by a delightful, inventive play of scattered objects. As we follow the converging lines of the floor and bed to an unmarked point, we come to a rival perspective system in the dark lines of the casements, of which the repeated angles occur again in a series of surrounding objects of different color and complexity: the distant chair and table, the picture wires, the ceiling corner, and the inclined pictures at the right. Together they form a free pattern of zigzags across the space, flattened and softened in the wavy lines of the bed boards. Van Gogh Paintings for Sale

In the color Van Gogh has played with still other competing centers of sharp contrast; the pairing of light yellow with stark vermilion, the strongest note of color in the picture; diagonally opposite, the black-framed mirror with its intense light, the brightest tone in the entire work. These colors, unexpected, isolated notes, lie outside the prevailing luminous scheme of yellow, orange, and blue. Within that system are interesting alternations of tones - the yellow and orange of the furniture, the green and yellow of the window: these remind us of primitive pattern of color.