Starry Night Over the Rhone by Van Gogh Florent Bodart The horizontal expanse gives his

The horizontal expanse gives his abstract vocabulary room to breathe: forms drift and collide

lit by a palette of warm skin tones set against flatter

It sits within a lineage of European surrealism filtered through contemporary visual culture

This vintage celestial map plots the visible stars with the meticulous care of a nineteenth-century astronomer — constellations traced in fine engraved line

its elongated neck and dagger-shaped bill rendered with the meticulous accuracy demanded by nineteenth-century natural history publications

Starry Night Over the Rhone by Van Gogh Florent Bodart The horizontal expanse gives hisStarry Night Over the Rhone predates its more famous sibling by nearly a year, painted in Arles in September 1888. Where the later work churns with interior urgency, this one holds a different quality expansive, almost tender. Gas lamps from the city bank stretch luminous reflections across the river's dark surface, and above, the Great Bear constellation wheels in a sky of deep Prussian blue. Two figures walk at the water's edge. Van Gogh's brushwork