Epiphany is a noun that usually means a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. Now you might be thinking, why start this article with a word elucidation? So, let me answer that it is because you have to respond to my next question before you dive into any kind of information. When was the last time you had a clear moment of clarity in which you knew your heart’s desire, saw yourself in the fullest sense, knew the way forward, or just received a sense of wholeness and well-being and a moment of epiphany, only to have it slip away in the busyness of life? Perhaps you might had a moment on your last vacation where the starry night spoke with your solitude, and you had a quiet moment as you looked at the patterns of the mighty and never-ending sky before anyone even awoke. By quieter moments, I mean stillness in your thoughts when nothing bothered you at the time, and there was only a feeling in your heart that is an impetus to transform your life. Leaving behind the hustle and bustle of life, disappointments, fear, and insecurities, you just kept watching the gleaming stars, which actually responded to your silence through their mysterious ways, as if the entire universe or cosmic understood you at the very moment. The starry night couldn’t be better as it was really a soul-stirring masterpiece, and you never saw the night so stimulating before. To this intriguing imagination, I want you to now feel exactly what Vincent might have seen in those deep and mysterious skies when he painted his curling patterns in his painting The Starry Night. This is the right moment to finally start our journey toward reading about the artwork of our beloved Vincent, which is one of his absolute masterpieces.
The Starry Night | Fast Knowledge
The Starry Night is one of the masterpieces of Vincent van Gogh, which portrays the swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky with brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows with large flame-like cypresses. Using the high stylized effects, impasto, broad and expressive brushstrokes, and optimal colors, Vincent painted it for an exhibition in June 1889.
General Information About The Starry Night Painting.
1. Artist Statement.
“Once I went for a walk along the deserted shore at night. It was not cheerful, it was not sad- it was beautiful.”
Letter 499, Vincent Van Gogh
2. Subject Matter.
The Starry Night painting depicts the swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky with brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows with large flame-like stars and black shadowy cypress trees. Indeed, an exceptional artwork, this painting is an expression of the turbulent mind of Vincent, which he portrayed well with his thickly layered brushstrokes. The glittering stars with the wave reflections of water in the sky scarcely cater better to Romantic tastes. Vincent basically painted stars out in the open, which we saw in the night pictures like this one. About night paintings, I will tell you in later sections in detail. The Starry Night skies have comparatively larger stars. It is because of the fact that Vincent, when moved to Arles, saw the stars in a brighter state without any interference from the street lights and gas, and he spent hours contemplating them. He explained the night with the words,
“It often seems to me that the night is even more richly colored than the day, colored with the most intense violets, blues, and greens. If you look carefully, you’ll see that some stars are lemony, and others have a pink, green, forget-me-not-blue glow. And without laboring the point, it’s clear to paint a starry sky; it’s not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black.” (678, 14 September 1888)
We will understand more about the mesmerizing painting with the subject matter context in the following sections.
3. Artist.
Vincent Van Gogh painted The Starry Night. When I speak of the artist’s style, he shows his effect on the cohesive whole (the complete canvas). Charles Blanc wrote in his Grammaire des arts du dessin,
“Style is reality write large, simplified, stripped of all irrelevant detail, reduced to its original essence, its distinctive appearance.”
According to Blanc, the hallmark of his painting was his use of optimal colors, irregular perspective, and highly expressive brushstrokes. In the early days of Vincent’s career, he took this advice to heart, where he described the canvases mastered in a way ‘purposeful’. He spontaneously used painting techniques in studies from nature, offering less scope for such stylization. For instance, Vincent used to prefer the impasto ‘Reaper’, which was a study from nature to a more timid replica made in his studio. Now, I have written a separate article on the Impasto technique, which you can refer to know more about it.
4. Date.
Vincent painted The Starry Night in the month of June of the year 1889.
5. Provenance.
A little provenance of the painting is that Vincent painted this composition a few months later when he saw the first signs of his illness and departed from the Gauguin, who came to Arles to be his staying companion. I have well described his arrival in Arles in the painting analysis of Sunflowers. Now, after Gauguin left, a month later, Vincent decided to admit himself in the Asylum of Saint Paul de Maousole, where he apparently gained his consciousness to create his last full-fledged works like Avenue with Flowering Chestnuts, View of Arles and Dormitory in the Hospital.
In May 1889, Vincent arrived in Saint Remy, where he continued the traditional path with the paintings, but after he heard about the modernist exhibition that his friends were organizing in the Parisian cafe Volpini to complement the World Exhibition, he changed his art style a bit. Though Theo declined an invitation for his brother to take part, which left Vincent disappointed, the exhibition did lead him to get inspired by his fellow artists in Paris with highly stylized effects with exaggerated lines. This time, he created The Starry Night, but Vincent was not satisfied with this experiment. As he dispatched ‘The Starry Night’, he mentioned that it was one of the canvasses that spoke to him ‘nothing’. Now, I will tell you the detailed context of the painting in upcoming sections.
6. Location.
The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh is on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
7. Technique and Medium.
The painting has the medium of oil on canvas in the post-impressionism technique. Vincent has used exaggerated brushstrokes with the optimal choice of colors here. There is a use of highly stylized effects with exaggerated lines because ‘where the lines are close together and accentuated, that is where the painting begins,’ Vincent wrote in his letter 607. Using impasto, he accurately used highly expressive work. Firstly he used a surface, which was prepared with an off-white priming, that is visible all over the canvas: in the sky, the landscape, mountains, and trees. He used an underlayer which suggests that this composition was executed slowly- perhaps in two or three sessions with the curing time in between. Vincent gently counterpoints the deep blues and greens, which dominate the picture but at the same time, he links it with the lightness of the linear flow of fatter strokes, which lie over it. Vincent knew that if there was a lag in the purposeful integration of the underlayer, the painted surface would turn dense, so he used rapid execution, which means he painted wet on wet. He first applied a color and then instantly used another as the first color dried up. We will learn more about color in the formal analysis of the painting in a later section.
| Artist | Vincent van Gogh |
| Year Painted | June 1889 |
| Genre | Landscape Art |
| Period | Post-Impressionism |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 73.7 x 92.1 cm |
| Price | Not on sale |
| Where is it housed? | The Museum of Modern Art, New York (F161, JH1731) |
Now, that we know a little description of the painting, let us learn it in detail.
Detailed Description of The Starry Night.
About the Artist: Vincent van Gogh.
Previously, I wrote articles on other mesmerizing paintings of Vincent, like Bedroom in Arles, Almond Blossoms, Wheatfield With Crows, Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds, and more, where I described small instances of Vincent’s life. Today, in this section, I am describing Vincent’s few experiences in the Arles, most importantly, his experiments with the portraiture genre, a lesser-known one.
In Arles, Vincent was never far from water, which often brought back memories of his native Netherlands. From Roman times, the Rhône, which runs through Arles, has played a crucial role in the development of the town. A canal to Port-de-Bouc opened up a more navigable route to the Mediterranean in the 1830s, and Arles later became a major river port. Vincent was extremely captivated by this Dutch-style drawbridge on the Port-de-Bouc Canal, which he called Pont de L’Anglais (Englishman). He once wrote,
“The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald and a rich blue in the landscapes, as we see it in the Japanese prints.”
Hence, he painted many artworks while he admired the beauty of Rhône.
Another story from Arles, is about Vincent and his portraiture. It is interesting to note that Vincent always found it difficult to get models to pose for him so that he could paint as he had little money to pay them, and strangers found it really awkward. When he finally got sitters, they disliked what he painted as they expected something more conventional. In addition to this, rarely remarked is that Vincent found it challenging to paint his family and close friends because it involved too much intimacy. However, during the summer of 1888, Vincent finally succeeded in persuading some of his friends from Arles and acquaintances to sit for him, but unlike conventional portraits, he used expressive depictions of a type- a concept dating to the Dutch Golden Age. He was successful in depicting extremely captivating faces and personalities of an individual. Among the special skills Van Gogh brought to his Arles portraits was his use of color. According to him, most artists produce flesh tones that appear realistic up close, but flat when viewed from a distance. Vincent used a variety of pigments, ‘mostly colors one cannot name’, but which were effective if one stepped back a little. Upon close inspection, his faces seem composed of a variety of pigments, many of which look nothing like flesh- but from a distance, they appear to be alive (unfortunately, Van Gogh’s pigments have deteriorated, leaving a slightly blotchy appearance). One of his earliest paintings where you can see this skill is Mousme, a young Japanese girl. Vincent described his own mousme (age 12) as,
“brown eyes, black hair, eyebrows, flesh yellow grey… an oleander flower in her sweet little hand.”
The most successful summer portrait of the artist was of Eugene Bock, a Belgian artist who stayed in Fontvielli.
Historical Background of the Painting.
The Starry Night is a painting that has numerous contexts because it was placed squarely within the ambitions, anxieties, social dilemmas, and extraordinary isolation of Vincent. Starting from the letter Vincent wrote to his brother, Letter 580,
“As far as I can judge, I am not actually mentally ill. You will see that the pictures I painted in the period between my two attacks are calm and no worse than others I have done. Having no work to do is more serious than its tiring effects.”
From the words, we can see that Vincent painted many of his works while he struggled with the bouts of mental instability, one of them is The Starry Night. However, it must be clear that his works were naturally influenced by his insanity. But it must to noted that the features of the schizophrenic patients’ works, who sometimes produce art, have no match in comparison to what Vincent produced, hence the artist had purely creative work. The art of Vincent after 1888 had a whirling, spiraling, undulating use of line coupled with an emphatic use of color, which was meant to convey the mania the painter felt to be plaguing him. It was no longer based on utopias, but was more compact and personal, though sometimes it seemed forced in its gesticulatory qualities. Now, Vincent, again and again, reassured Theo that he was similar to Vincent before, but there were indeed striking changes in his nature after he lived in Saint-Remy, where he adopted his ‘lunatic’ role deliberately. I will let you know about his art changes more in the later section of this point as we will now move to first his personal life, narrating how he reached Saint-Remy.
Saint-Remy and Vincent.
Arles appealed to Vincent because of its amazing landscaped nature, which resembled peace like in a Japanese village. He found many friends here, like postal clerk Roulin, cafe proprietor Ginoux, and more. There was a certain kind of thoughtfulness in Arles because of its balance in nature, cades, parks, and public thoroughfares with an amazing outlying countryside, which welcomed the analogies of Vincent’s native Netherlands and Japanese village. Now, at first, Vincent had the opportunity to gradually absorb his own practice and lessons in Arles, but after some time, he asked Gauguin to join him. It was all about October when Gauguin finally reached Arles, and they lived in The Yellow House. I have already explained this part in the Sunflowers article, so I am skipping it now. Now, there were a lot of differences between Gauguin and Vincent; Gauguin was tidy, Van Gogh was chaotic, and both of their professional tastes were different. As Gauguin favored painting with flat surfaces and woven textures, Vincent at the same time created his works on palpable fracture using complementary colors. Now, these were a little too scarce points to notice, but sooner, these differences turned into chaotic psychological crises. And there were traumatic fights between them. Last time, Vincent actually mutilated his left ear, which led Gauguin to leave Arles and Vincent. While this was not the first time that the artist felt such psychological dilemmas since he consulted a psychologist in the Hague around 1879-80, for which we don’t know the exact diagnosis. However, in late December 1888, this spiraling cycle of this lengthening crisis interspersed with the periods of stability and work of the artist. Vincent spent his early months of 1889 in a public hospital at Arles when he voluntarily entered himself into the asylum at Saint-Remy. About Saint-Remy, you must know that it was a modest little town with less population in the midst of the Rhône and Durance rivers and the medieval city of Avignon with the dramatic rocky peaks of little Alps. The Saint Paul de Mausole asylum was well run by Dr. Auguste Peyron, and Vincent entered it on May 8. He was given regular supervision in which he had regular meals and some treatments essentially hydrotherapy. For the first two months in the Asylum, he created the famous, The Starry Night. Note that before this composition, he painted Starry Night over the Rhône, which I will tell you about shortly.
Change of Art Style.
Before the Saint-Remy section, I left discussing the art style that dramatically changed the artworks of Vincent. The majority of Vincent’s paintings before his move to Saint Remy were totally altered. He was well known among them for the themes and perspectives that he focused on in the short amount of time that was left to him, the late work, as it were. The use of vivid close-ups and copies was to be Van Gogh’s preferred technique; both kinds of work held the promise of intimacy and trust, bridging the rift between the world outside and the world inside which had become such an ordeal for him. It was obvious to him that painting was the only means of meaningful communication left, and he pursued this possibility as evidenced by the last pictures he produced in Arles. As you read the formal analysis of the painting, The Starry Night, there will be more things to know about its style and techniques.
The Era of Night Paintings.
The foremost thing to know is that The Starry Night was not the first time when Vincent depicted the night sky. The painting of the stars and the city lights reflected in the River Rhône, one of the first results of the plan he shared with Emile Bernard in April 1888, had been one of his greatest accomplishments in Arles. A starry night was a way for him to demonstrate his ability to work from the imagination, which could enhance the value of the painting,
“We may succeed in creating a more exciting and comforting nature than we can discern with a single glimpse of reality.”
Vincent made more explicit about the motif in a letter to Theo on the same date,
“a starry night with cypresses, or possibly above a field of ripe wheat.”
As I told you previously Vincent saw stars differently in Arles and this is because he painted them or took them as his subject of the painting. But before composing these starry night paintings, he first started with the night painting, The Night Cafe.
In a letter to Theo in August 1888, Vincent wrote,
“I am probably going to start on the interior of the cafe where I’m staying, in the evening, by gaslight. It’s what they call a ”night cafe” here (they’re quite common here), that stays open all night. This way the ”night prowlers” can find a refuge when they don’t have the price of a lodging, or if they’re too drunk to be admitted.”
The following month, he stayed up for three nights and slept during the day to set up a cafe painting, The Night Cafe. And a week later, he composed a different nocturnal scene, Cafe Terrace at Night which showed the mood more benign. As in the Night Cafe, the Cafe Terrace at Night did not portray the claustrophobia, instead it showed more free space with a night sky having exaggerated stars shining over the Place du Forum. Vincent explained,
“I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night.”
His third major night-time painting in this series, Starry Night Over the Rhône, depicts the vastness of the Rhône, looking south to the Arles. Reflections of gaslights in the fast-flowing river become highly exaggerated as the river flows. An Artlesiene and her lover linger on the sandbar, enjoying each other’s company. By chance, a newspaper report briefly mentions Vincent working on this picture. This article names one of the four artists who were painting in Arles, writing,
“Mr. Vincent, an impressionist painter, works, we are told, in the evening, by the light of the gaslamps, in one of our squares”
– probably a reference to Place Lamartine. It represents one of the earliest published references to the artist.
Starry Night over the Rhône or Starry Night, Arles is the precursor of the most celebrated painting, The Starry Night, which he painted the following summer after he moved to the asylum at Saint-Remy. There were a lot of differences in both paintings. In The Starry Night, Vincent showed the stars and crescent moon illuminating in a pair with dark soaring cypresses. The stars showed great inspiration for Vincent as he relished the warm Provencal nights which offered comfortable viewing conditions. To explain, Vincent wrote,
‘The sight of the stars always make me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream.”
Lastly, I would like to tell you a few inspirations of Vincent for this artwork
On June 17 or 18 letter to Theo, which announced The Starry Night painting, Vincent made several allusions, majorly associating himself with the new aesthetic of Gauguin and Bernard, repeatedly emphasizing the rejection of their naturalistic representation of nature, while applauding for Delacroix’s work, especially, Christ Asleep during the Tempest. Previously, in one of his letters of 2 June, he also admired the increasing number of returning artists to the mid-century like Millet, Rousseau, and Delacroix. To invoke this memory while he was in social isolation in the Saint Remy Asylum, Vincent invokes his artistic allegiances and analogies which can sustain his work. The painting Christ Asleep during the Tempest, displayed in Paris in 1886, was one of his favorites. Delacroix’s continuous rhythmic brushwork, visible both in the sky and on the water in this painting, as well as his intense use of color, especially in the yellow rays of the halo that surround Christ’s blue-cowled head, a chromatic arrangement reminiscent of Starry Night’s constellations.
Now, I have explained a lot more things, but there are many stories linked to it, which you can read in detail in Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. If you wish to read everything, that happened to our beloved artist after his experience in Arles, you can read Van Gogh: The Life, which even sheds light on some of the previously unknown facts about the life of Vincent.
Understanding the Meaning of The Starry Night.
The Starry Night was an attempt by Vincent to create a masterpiece on par with the very stylized work of Gauguin and Bernard. For a nocturnal effect, surfaces and silhouettes would usually play a greater role than lines, but Vincent chose a graphic style that was not obvious. This sense of artificiality extends to the style, as well as to the scene itself, which has been constructed from various natural studies. Vincent sent the works to his brother Theo, though he was not very pleased with the results. The artist had doubts about the painting, but it is one of his most important and exceptional works due to its combination of style and religious overtones. In spite of several investigations, the science of astronomy has not been able to provide a conclusive answer as to whether Vincent’s night sky is true to life.
The Starry Night painting depicted the new stylized effect, which Vincent used in his artwork to depict his social isolation, madness, and traumatic health. It is basically a paysage compose, which means it was painted from the imagination in the studio from the preliminary studies and observations made in nature. We do know that it is a kind of emotional painting where he painted the sky because of his mesmerizing memories of Arles. But there is a lot more to learn about the painting’s meaning because there were numerous factors that shaped The Starry Night. For instance, Vincent mentioned to Millet that there were no romantic or religious ideas in the painting because religion to him was contradictory at that point in time. However, it didn’t prevent the several interpreters from interpreting that it had some links to religion as they were aware of Vincent’s processes of practice and thought, layered and associative from the imputing ideas. He was a notable reader, as he loved reading Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times, and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman, which had a fairy description of the imagery of the stars. Similarly, he also read Zola’s highly romantic Le Rêve, which portrayed the dark starlit night as a repeated contrast to the virginal whiteness of Angelique’s bedroom. Lastly, Vincent also had a keen fascination with the starry sky with considerable advances in astronomy science and most popularly, the publications which explained stars. Several analogies can be drawn between Camille Flammarion’s view that Jesus, Buddha, Newton, and Galileo are reincarnated on distant stars and the notion that Jesus, Buddha, Newton, and Galileo were reincarnated on distant stars. Similarly, Van Gogh muses that the great artists of the past continue to work on “other orbs.” However, he has not read any of Flammarion’s texts, and such speculations were commonplace in an era whose faith in scientific progress was countered by a fascination with ectoplasm and Ouija boards. Hence, The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh has several complex meanings inside it, which I can’t conclude in a few words.
Subject Matter and Dominant Elements
The painting portrays a swirling dark blue sky with shiny stars in a similar pattern. To explain them in more detail, I did a detailed color analysis in the next section, which can clear your thoughts on the different kinds of stars in the sky. Vincent used an orange crescent-shaped moon for the astral presence in the painting, binding the nature forces all together without the hint to humankind. And while you deeply indulge yourself in the painting, there is a large black cypress, which contrasts well in this painting. Below the ridge, there is a middle ground which is portrayed through olive green. Not to neglect, with the same color, Vincent depicted the central hillside and foliage to the left of the cypresses. It also consists of trees around the village in a series of half loops with the effect of moonlight. To the center of the painting, some buildings are systematically blocked out in descriptive rectangular shapes and illuminating windows with dull yellow, orange, and sharp green colors. To the right side, there are houses with distinguishing walls and roofs, a sign of speedy execution by the artist. Finally, at the center-bottom edge of the painting, there are parallel strokes of colors like brown, pale, and dark blue with rich mid-green, acting as a filling space. Lastly, next to it, there are houses that have a sense of recession.
Formal Analysis of The Starry Night.
1. Rhythm.
Vincent coupled the color with rhythm. There is a use of rectilinear treatment of the village in the painting which contradicts the pulsing forms, which makes the night as if it is a quintessential country picture. There is silence and inactivity in the night but Vincent enhances the sensibilities of the great forces of nature that are untroubling to humankind. Though the beholder’s eye is attracted to the haloed stars and gleaming infinite blues, it also reminds of rippling terrestrial rhythms. The pumps in the undulating forms of the vegetation like hills or trees particularly show tumbling topography. There is a dynamic and flowing stroke in the painting. The artwork is a celebration of the natural energies, where Vincent crafted his vigorous rhythmic forms to portray the constant cyclic movement of nature.
2. Color, Light, and Brushstrokes.
There is a varied use of color in the painting, The Starry Night. Starting from the mid-blue which Vincent applied in swirls with the darker blue, and blanched midgreen later, he showed the distinctive way of the sky. Above and below these twisting central shapes, Vincent used horizontal strokes to the right in a restless order. Then the gaps, that Vincent left at first in the sky were used for the stars and there was a strong confidence when it came to applying colors without the use of any recourse to a preparatory drawing of the composition. Though the stars were generally dull yellow centers, surrounded with white or orange dots, their auras seemed distinctive. The star which is at the top of the tree simply consists of an orange disc with a pale blue aura, whereas the centre left had a yellow color in the middle. It feels as if the colors are shifting, creating a motion in the painting. The moon in them has a thick orange crescent, surrounded by a pale yellow-green, drifting into a circular glow in duck-egg blue. Finally, the cypress has a dark black color, and the palette of the small houses is dark green, brown, and a deep aubergine violet. Had Vincent did not put up his arcing, dipping, and swirling shapes, the painting would simply look like a normal landscape. With the use of shapes and brushstrokes, the artist created a compositional crescendo with a formal focus that is at once fascinating and extraordinary, pitched against the strongly realized spatial structure with an echo of rhythmic momentum of the brushstrokes. In chromatic terms, the painting is a harmony in blue with an extraordinary and complementary orange of the astral bodies. However, there are subtle counterpoints of green and brown with somber, rich, and elusive colors of night.
Final Words.
The Starry Night is one of the most mesmerizing paintings from Vincent van Gogh’s collection. With a compelling form of stylization, he filled the landscape with hills, swirling sky, and unusual illusionary stars to render the night with an exaggerated effect. With The Starry Night, painted in the mental asylum, he literally fulfilled the promise, which he did so in time to prove himself as equal to his fellow artists. Despite his all traumas and retarding mental conditions, he painted an unusually beautiful painting, which touched millions of hearts through the emotional belongings, Vincent left on his canvas.
Resources.
- Vincent van Gogh: The Starry Night by Richard Thomson.
- Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Paintings by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Walther.
- Vincent van Gogh by Johannes van der Wolk, Ronald Pickvance, E.B.F. Pey, Evert van Uitert, Louis van Tilborgh, and Sjraar van Heugten.
- Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, Edited by Jean Stone and Irving Stone.
- Featured Image: The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Frequently Asked Questions.
The Starry Night is located in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is one of the most famous artworks of Vincent van Gogh, which depicts the social isolation, madness, and traumatic health of the artist.
Vincent van Gogh painted the composition, The Starry Night. In this painting, the artist uses a rectilinear treatment of the background contrasting with the pulsing forms of the stars and swirling sky.
The Starry Night was painted in June of 1889 while he was in Saint Remy. Vincent portrays a silent and inactivity of the night, which has the greater forces of nature untroubling to humankind.
Vincent painted The Starry Night after he heard that his friends were organizing a modernist exhibition in the Parisian cafe Volpini to complete the World Exhibition. Though he did not participate in the exhibition, but he sent his painting The Starry Night, which he created with a new technique of highly stylized effect with exaggerated lines to it.
Vincent painted this artwork out of his imagination of the studio, which was in Arles through the studies of preliminary studies and observations he made through nature. Basically called a paysage composition, the artwork portrays a sentimental emotion through the mesmerizing memories of Arles experienced by the artist.
The Starry Night features two art movements- Post-Impressionism and Modernism. It is one of the most exceptional works of the artist, due to the combination of style and religious overtones. One undermined fact about the artwork is that Vincent wasn’t satisfied with what he composed here, as in his own words, the painting spoke ‘nothing’ to him.
The most significant elements used in Starry Night are rhythms, color, and brush strokes. To summarise, Vincent used haloed stars and gleaming infinite blues to remind rippling terrestrial rhythms, along with swirling brushstrokes. I have explained these pretty well in the formal analysis of the painting.
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