Starry Night over the Rhône

Starry Night over the Rhône, which Van Gogh called simply La Nuit étoilée (Starry Night), is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh, made in Arles in September 1888 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. It measures about 72 × 92 cm.

Painting a starry sky had preoccupied Van Gogh for some time. In June 1888 he asked Émile Bernard when he would ever paint the starry sky that had haunted him, and he told his sister Willemien that the night often seemed to him more richly coloured than the day, adding that one could not paint stars simply by putting white dots on blue-black. Earlier the same month he had painted Café Terrace at Night. For this canvas he set up on the quay of the Rhône, a minute or two's walk from the Yellow House on Place Lamartine, looking south-west across the bend of the river towards the old town and the iron bridge to Trinquetaille.

In a letter to Theo with a small sketch he listed the colours: an aquamarine sky, royal blue water, mauve ground, a blue and purple town, yellow gaslight with reflections running from russet gold down to green bronze, and the Great Bear sparkling green and pink against the brutal gold of the gas. The Plough could not in fact be seen in that direction, since it lies to the north; Van Gogh combined two views into one picture. Two colourful figures of lovers stroll by the boats in the foreground, an area he reworked wet-in-wet. Here the stars are painted like small flowers; in The Starry Night of June 1889 his treatment had changed.

Theo showed the painting, together with Irises, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1889, although Vincent had proposed a view of the public garden in Arles. In 1899 the Dutch writer Bas Veth bought it from Theo's widow; after his death it eventually entered the Musée d'Orsay.