Contextual Analysis: A Brief Socio-Historical Overview. Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night Over the Rhône when he lived in Arles, a city in southern France. He moved to Arles in February 1888 from Paris, where he lived for around two years with his brother Theo van Gogh. In May of 1888, Van Gogh reportedly utilized the famous Yellow House Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon. Wheat Fields is a series of dozens of paintings by Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, borne out of his religious studies and sermons, connection to nature, appreciation of manual laborers and desire to provide a means of offering comfort to others. That surely is the case with Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Take the version in London’s National Gallery that the Dutch artist painted in Arles in the South of France in August 1888. Vincent van Gogh, born in 1853, grew up in the southern Netherlands, where his father was a minister. After seven years at a commercial art firm, Van Gogh’s desire to help humanity led him to become a teacher, preacher, and missionary—yet without success. Working as a missionary among coal miners in Belgium, he had begun to draw in earnest Still Life with Irises - by Vincent van Gogh: Head of a Peasant Woman - by Vincent van Gogh: The Langlois Bridge at Arles - by Vincent van Gogh: Enclosed Field with Ploughman - by Vincent van Gogh: Landscape with Snow - by Vincent van Gogh: Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin - by Vincent van Gogh Stairway at Auvers, 1890 by Vincent Van Gogh. In its broad symmetry, pairings, recurrent arabesques, and wavy, ribboned patterning, this is one of van Gogh's pictures closest to ornament and the popular decorative taste of the 1890s, the so-called Art Nouveau. It recalls this art too by its flatness, reduced substance and general lightness of Like his predecessor, Rembrandt van Rijn, Van Gogh was a devoted and probing practitioner of the art of self–portraiture. He painted no fewer than 36 self–portraits, undertaking his first forays just after his arrival in Paris in March 1886 and executing his last, culminant works during his stay at the asylum of Saint–Paul–de–Mausole Story Behind the Song: Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’. “Starry, starry night/ Paint your palette blue and grey/ Look out on a summer’s day/ With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.”. Those words came to Don McLean as he looked at Vincent Van Gogh’s 1889 painting “The Starry Night.”. Soon, he had a masterpiece of his own .

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