Starry Night - van Gogh Notebook

From the miner's lamp of Nuenen to the one he placed on his window-sill following the scene with Gauguin; from the evening star he noted in 1875 in Corot Olive Orchard to the letter he wrote to his brother in August 1888, in which he said: "Some day or other you will see a picture of the little house itself bathed in sunlight, or else with the window lighted and a starry sky above"--throughout these years Van Gogh was obsessed by the symbolism of luminous objects and of colour. The lamp was a symbol of calm and security. The star symbolised faith, and gaslight, human realities. Deep ultramarine blue was infinity, while red and green expressed "those terrible things, men's passions." Prior to August 1888, he revealed these ideas only in his letters and made no real attempt to apply them in painting. There is no trace of them in the works of Holland and Paris, nor in the canvases he produced at Arles between February and August 1888 ( Orchard in Bloom, Le Pont de l' Anglois, Boats at Saintes-Maries, and many others), which are impressionist, "Japanese," decorative rather than expressionist and, in short, similar to those he had been painting in Paris. Two letters dated August and September 1888 throw a special light on Van Gogh's intentions. In August, he asserted his determination to become an "arbitrary colourist" so that he might paint the portrait of an artist friend "who dreams great dreams." In his picture he wished to express "his appreciation and love for him"; the fair head set against a background of rich blue would "produce a mysterious effect like a star in the azure depths of the sky." In the second of these letters, he spoke of his house at Arles, the lighted window and the starry sky above: a strange premonition of the scene with Gauguin. And yet Gauguin was not a mere harbinger of catastrophe, or even an innocent symbol of it. On the contrary, he came with a precious gift which was not to be lost on Van Gogh: that virile feeling for plastic values, that keen sense of construction in terms of colour which imparted a last degree of strength and solidity to the great symbolic pictures of Van Gogh's closing cycle of works.