James Hall believes painting’s ‘pyrotechnical music of the stars, sky and clouds’ recalls Paris monument’s spectacular opening
Art experts have long struggled to explain the inspiration behind Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, in which towering cypress trees are depicted against a swirling night sky over a hillside village. Created during his incarceration in an asylum near Saint-Rémy in the south of France, it is one of a series of paintings of cypress trees interpreted as an exploration of abstraction or a mystical evocation of nature.
In June 1889, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them. It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk.”
In 1887, a Paris newspaper published a letter signed by leading artists and writers condemning it as a “dizzily ridiculous tower”, and by the time Van Gogh left Paris in February 1888 its construction had risen above the skyline, reaching its first platform.
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