Starry Night Over the Rhone

The colour prints of the Japanese artists had been growing in popularity among French painters from the days of Ingres onward. Manet had shown them hanging on walls that he painted, and had approached their flatness through his lighting of the people in his pictures. Van Gogh goes still further in that direction, both in figure compositions and in landscapes, such as those with the flowering trees he found in the South--reminiscent of the cherryblossom prints of Hiroshige. And so the ideas he was developing in Paris go on unbroken, and he enters a new period of intense production. When brother Theo's money has all been spent for the paint that he uses so lavishly, he continues his work with India ink and a brush or a reed pen, noting that he had already used the medium in Holland, but that the reeds he finds in the Midi are better than those he had before. He works with an energy unusual even for him, during those first months at Arles. He delights in the beauty of the South and its people--who carry on something of the type brought there by the far-off ancestors who colonised the country and built its exquisite temples. But soon Vincent needs again the companionship of artists. It was not simply a personal loneliness, but had to do with his idea of modern art and its new direction. He writes to his brother that he is having a share in the French Renaissance that the painters of his generation are creating through their new discoveries.