Starry Night Over the Rhône

About the artwork

The long yellow trails in the water belong to the gas lamps on the opposite bank. Above them, the stars have a looser rhythm, scattered across the blue-green sky. The lamps connect the light to streets and buildings; the stars extend the scene beyond the city. Near the bottom, the couple gives our eye a place to stand.

Van Gogh painted this scene in Arles in September 1888, before the swirling Starry Night he would make at Saint-Rémy. Around the time of this painting, he told Theo that his need for religion led him outside at night to paint the stars. His attention could hold the heavens and the light of a lived-in town together. The calm horizontal bands of sky, city, and water make room for both.

Featured in: Was Van Gogh a Christian? His Faith in 11 Paintings, and the Café Terrace “Last Supper”

What does Psalm 147:4 mean?

Psalm 147 places the numbering and naming of the stars beside God’s care for people: He rebuilds Jerusalem, gathers the outcasts, and heals the brokenhearted. The movement from wounded people to the heavens is part of the same praise.

To count and name is to attend to particulars. The stars are not an indistinguishable mass, and the people gathered and healed are not lost in a crowd. In the gallery’s pairing, the two small figures beneath the wide sky help us consider how such different scales can belong within one field of care.

Psalm 147:4 joins the vastness of the stars to a praise that also remembers displaced and hurting people.

Sources

Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1975 19.

Was Van Gogh a Christian? His Faith in 11 Paintings. Painting history and the limits of the religious interpretation, with primary letters and museum sources.

Psalm 147 — Berean Standard Bible.

Van Gogh to Theo — letter 691. His September 1888 connection between religious longing and going outside to paint the stars.