Analysis of Starry Night: Painting by Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was one of the best artists in the world, with works such as' Starry Night' and' Sunflowers,' but until after his death he was anonymous. Vincent van Gogh was a post-impressionist painter whose work, notable for its beauty, emotion and color, influenced the art of the 20th century. He struggled with mental illness and throughout his life he remained poor and virtually unknown. Van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands, on March 30, 1853. The father of Van Gogh, Theodorus van Gogh, was an austere minister of the country, and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was a moody artist whose love for nature, drawing and watercolors was transferred to her son. Van Gogh was born exactly one year after the birth of the first son of his parents, also called Vincent. At a young age, already etched on the headstone of his dead brother with his name and birthdate, van Gogh was melancholy.

Two younger brothers (Theo, who worked as an art dealer and sponsored the art of his older brother, and Cor) and three younger sisters (Anna, Elizabeth and Willemien) were the youngest of six living children, van Gogh. Theo van Gogh would later play an important role as a confidant, friend, and art dealer in the life of his older brother. Van Gogh's family was financially struggling at the age of 15, and he was forced to leave school and go to work. He got a job at the art dealership of his Uncle Cornelis, Goupil & Cie., an art dealers ' company in The Hague. Van Gogh, as well as his native Dutch, was fluent in French, German and English at this time. Van Gogh had been transferred to the Groupil Gallery in London in June 1873. There he fell in love with the culture of English. Throughout his spare time, he toured art galleries and also became a collector of Charles Dickens and George Eliot's works. He fell in love with the daughter of his landlady, Eugenie Loyer, too. Van Gogh suffered a breakdown after she refused his marriage proposal. Except for the Bible, he threw away all his books and dedicated his life to God. He was furious with working people, telling customers not to buy the 'worthless painting,' and was eventually fired.

Van Gogh's job took him to London and Paris, but he didn't care about the work and was fired in 1876. He became a teacher in England for a short time and then a pastor in a mining community in southern Belgium, deeply interested in Christianity.

Van Gogh was an artist prolific. He painted for 10 years, making 860 pieces of art during this period of time. With dense layers of paint, his works show a clear form of movement and light. By having an original, prominent style of their own, artists cannot gain attention— so van Gogh worked to develop his distinct style. He transformed it into his own instead of simply copying the popular impressionism style back then; now van Gogh is recognized as an artist of post-impressionism. Until experimenting in color he felt it was necessary to perfect black and white and first concentrated on learning the basics of figure drawing and painting landscapes in the right perspective. He moved to the Hague in 1882 from his parents ' home in Etten, where he obtained some formal instruction from his cousin, Anton Mauve, a leading painter from Hague University. That same year, he carried out his first independent works in aquarelle and went to oil painting, as well as enjoying his first profits as an artist; His uncle, the art dealer Cornelis Marinus van Gogh, commissioned two sets of Hague townscape drawings for which Van Gogh chose to portray everyday locations such as railway station views, gas stations and nursery gardens.

His decision to paint rural life was influenced by Van Gogh's admiration for the Barbizon artists, especially Jean-François Millet. In the winter of 1884–85, while living in Nuenen with his parents, he painted over forty studies of peasant heads, culminating in his first large-scale multifigured composition (The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam); in this gritty portrayal of a mealtime peasant family, Van Gogh wrote that he sought to express that they had tilled the earth themselves with the same hands.

In late 1885, Van Gogh, engaged in perfecting his talents as a portrait painter, left the Netherlands to train at the Belgian Antwerp Academy. He left for Paris three months later, where he stayed with his brother Theo, an art dealer with Boussod's company, Valadon et Cie, and attended classes at the workshop of Fernand Cormon for a while. Throughout his two-year period in Paris (February 1886–February 1888) Van Gogh's style undergone a significant change. There he saw the art of the Impressionists first-hand and also encountered the neo-impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac's new inventions. In reaction, Van Gogh lightened his palette and played with the Impressionists ' fractured brushstrokes as well as the Neo-Impressionists ' pointillist style, as shown by the treatment of his Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat drawn on the back of an earlier peasant study in the summer of 1887. He performed over twenty self-portraits in Paris that reflect his ongoing exploration of complementary contrasts of color and a bolder style.

Van Gogh left Paris for the south of France in February 1888, hoping to set up an artist’s ' community in Arles. Captivated by the clarity of light and the vibrant colors of the Provençal spring, in less than a month, Van Gogh produced fourteen orchard paintings, painting outdoors and varying his style and technique. The Flowering Orchard's composition and calligraphic treatment reflect the influence of the Japanese prints acquired by Van Gogh. Even noticeable in the reed pen sketches he made in Arles is the artist's debt to ukiyo-e prints, characterized by their immense verve and linear creativity. He painted the Oleanders and Shoes of the still life in August; each work resonates with the personal symbolism of the artist. To Van Gogh, oleanders are cheerful and life-affirming (like the sunflower); with the compositional importance granted to La joie de vivre in 1884 by Émile Zola, he strengthened their meaning. The still life of unlaced shoes, apparently hung by Van Gogh in Arles ' 'yellow room' by Paul Gauguin, suggested the artist himself to Gauguin— he saw them as emblematic of the itinerant existence of Van Gogh.

In October, Gauguin visited Van Gogh in Arles and then resigned at the end of December 1888, a change precipitated by the collapse of Van Gogh, during which he sliced off half of his left ear with a razor. After his return from the hospital in January, he continued his work on a portrait of the postmaster Joseph Roulin's wife; while drawing all the members of the Roulin household, Van Gogh created five versions of Madame Roulin as La Berceuse, revealing the rope that rocks the cradle of her newborn daughter. He pictured her portrait as a triptych's center panel, surrounded by sunflowers portraits. For Van Gogh, her image transcended portraiture, resonating symbolically as a modern Madonna; from its palette, ranging from ocher to vermilion and malachite, Van Gogh expressed his desire to 'sing a lullaby with color,' emphasizing the expressive role of color in his art.

Fearing another breakdown, in May 1889, Van Gogh voluntarily entered the asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy, where he painted some 150 canvases over the course of the next year. His initial confines to the hospital's grounds are reflected in his imagery, from his portrayals of his corridors to the irises and lilacs of his walled garden, visible from the spare room window he was allotted to be used as a studio. He went beyond the hospital's grounds and painted the landscape surrounding him, devoting sequence to his olive groves and cypresses, which he saw as typical of Provence. In June, in a letter to his brother Theo, he created two paintings of cypresses, made in dark, impastoed layers of paint (49.30; Cypresses, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo). In a landscape, these evocative trees figure prominently, created the same month. Van Gogh saw this painting as one of his 'best' summer canvases, with its sun-drenched wheat field ondulating in the sky. At Saint-Rémy, he also used black-and-white images and prints to create versions of paintings by artists like Delacroix, Rembrandt, and Millet. He executed twenty-one copies in the fall and winter of 1889–90 after Millet described his copies as 'interpretations' or 'translations,' comparing his role as an artist with that of another composer's musician playing music. In his last week at the hospital, by drawing four Irises and Roses bouquets as a final series similar to the sunflower decoration he made earlier in Arles, he expanded his palette of still life.

Van Gogh left in May 1890 after a year at Saint-Rémy to live in Auvers-sur-Oise, near his brother Theo in Paris, under the supervision of Dr. Paul Gachet, a homeopathic physician and amateur artist. Van Gogh completed a drawing a day in just over two months; however, he shot himself in a wheat field in the chest on July 27, 1890 and died two days later. His artistic legacy is preserved in the paintings and drawings that he left behind, as well as in his voluminous correspondence, primarily with Theo, which reveals his working methods and artistic intentions and serves as a reminder of the pivotal role played by his brother throughout his career as a supporting element.

Van Gogh's work had begun to gain critical attention by the time of his death in 1890. His works exhibited in 1888 and 1890 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris and in 1890 at Les XX in Brussels. As Gauguin wrote to him, many artists found his recent works on display at the Paris Independents to be 'the most exceptional' in the show; and one of his paintings was purchased from the Brussels exhibition of 1890. In January 1890, a first full-length essay on Van Gogh was written by the critic Albert Aurier, aligning his work with the emerging symbolist movement and emphasizing the originality and strength of his artistic vision. By the start of World War I, with the Fauves and German Expressionists recognizing his talent, Vincent van Gogh had already risen as a leading figure in modern art history. In 1889, the year before his death, Van Gogh painted 'The Starry Night' in the asylum where he stayed in Saint-Rémy, France. 'I saw the countryside a long time before sunrise from my window this morning, with nothing but the morning star that looked very big,' he wrote to his brother Theo.

The mixture of the impasto technique and the different line form gives us the illusion that the painting is moving, reflecting Van Gogh's night sky nature. The artist used blue / yellow accents in a variety of dark and gloomy colors. The white and yellow create a spiraling effect, drawing attention to the stars. We also have horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions. Horizontal is dominant and there is a 'calm' and static mood in painting. The sky and tree lines look three-dimensional. The surface also provided contrast, helping to distinguish the different planes. The painting's quality is mostly blues and yellow as well. The Starry Night was made in low major value.

From the analysis, it can be concluded that Vincent van Gogh was a lover of the night and saw in the night sky the inner beauty that people usually overlook. From the art he has conveyed that night time is not just about darkness; it can sometimes be too bright and can hold a ray of hope that makes in its contrast the earthly things look bleak and gloomy. The artwork often includes a link between life and death that is apparent because of the ill health of the painter and the inevitability of his experience of death. While he didn't look forward to it, he accepted the idea that death would come soon, and ultimately he would have to come to terms with it.