Starry Night Over the Rhône

The story of Starry Night Over the Rhône

The gas lamps of Arles run along the far bank and reflect in long gold streaks across the river, the Big Dipper hangs overhead, and a couple walks arm in arm along the near shore. Van Gogh painted it in September 1888, outdoors, by the light of a gas lamp, a year before the Starry Night everyone knows. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Where the later painting churns, this one is still: the sky is a deep, even blue, the stars are set out almost like a map, and the whole scene feels like the end of a good evening rather than the middle of a storm.

On a wall, this is the easier Starry Night to live with. The dominant colors are Prussian blue and teal with gold lamplight and pale green-white stars, and it reads as calm rather than dramatic from across a room. It suits a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, a study, or a hallway, and it fits coastal, modern, traditional, and blue-and-brass interiors. We offer it up to the Medium at 20.6 × 16 in, the size that lets the reflections stretch across the water, and the Small at 15.5 × 12 in is right above a nightstand or a vanity.

The Starry Night is the obvious companion, and the two hang well together as before-and-after. Café Terrace at Night was painted the same month in the same town, and Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge is the other great painting of lamplight on a river. More from Vincent van Gogh.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Orsay canvas, with the deep blue kept deep rather than brightened.