Starry Night over the Rhône, Pen Sketch (1888)

A Night on the Rhône in a Few Strokes

Vincent van Gogh drew this small pen-and-ink sketch in Arles in the autumn of 1888, after painting Starry Night over the Rhône outdoors at night under the gas lamps. He included sketches of the composition in his letters to his brother Theo and to the Belgian painter Eugène Boch, so they could picture the new canvas, which is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Reading the Sketch

A curved quay sweeps in from the left and runs across the picture, lined with buildings and a church tower. Beneath it, the lights of the town fall into the river as columns of vertical hatching. The sky is filled with even horizontal strokes, broken by the pale circles of the stars, and in the lower right corner a couple walks along the near bank.

An Earlier Starry Night

This Arles scene comes about nine months before Van Gogh's famous The Starry Night (June 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Here the stars hang over a real river and a real town, and the drama comes from the contrast between natural starlight and the new gaslight of the city.

Bringing the Sketch Home

The grey-and-white tones of this image give it a crisp, print-like look that suits contemporary spaces, studies and monochrome gallery walls.