Star Man: Vincent van Gogh’s Illuminated Nights

There are two works in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection that seem to perfectly distill the significance of light and illumination to Vincent van Gogh’s art. Each is—or stands in for—one of the artist’s most iconic works. The first is a print, a lithograph, he made in 1885, relating to one of his earliest major painterly efforts, The Potato Eaters. A group of peasants gather around a table to partake in a humble evening meal, the setting illuminated by an oil lamp suspended above them. The second is one of the most famous and beloved pictures at MoMA, one known to art lovers throughout the world: The Starry Night. In that iconic scene, the nighttime sky is packed to bursting with an array of celestial forms, their halos seeming to pulse with light.

Vincent van Gogh. The Potato Eaters. 1885

These two images appear to encapsulate the types of elemental motifs to which Van Gogh was often drawn: a simple repast indoors, lit by a single, relatively primitive lighting source; and a landscape that highlights the awe-inspiring beauty of the heavenly cosmos. Yet they sidestep another major aspect of his approach, which confronted the changes in human habits and activity impelled by the introduction of new, modern—and industrially derived—forms of illumination in the 19th century: his fascination with gaslight. Van Gogh’s intervening dalliance with artificial illumination highlights a crucial missing link between these two images, and was a key step in getting from the humble meal to the coruscating nighttime sky, as it saw him exploring the effects of light from multiple sources in a relational way.

Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889

Given our general sense of Van Gogh’s immersion in the natural world, an impression only fortified by pictures like The Starry Night, it’s important to remind ourselves that he was living in an era marked by rapid and widespread industrialization, one in which new forms of artificial illumination had begun thoroughly transforming modern experience. For most of human history, the rhythms of civilization had been shaped by the natural cycles of daylight and nighttime darkness. People had access to various sources of illumination—candles, torches, and lamps among them—but for most, light was a scarce and costly resource. As the industrial era progressed in 19th-century Europe, new types of artificial illumination changed all this, and gaslight led the way. Its ultimate source, one that underscores its rootedness in the age of industry, is flagged in one of its other common names: coal gas. Although it had long been recognized that the processing of coal released gasses along with other byproducts, it wasn’t until the turn of the 19th century that engineers and scientists began devising systems for capturing and harnessing coal gas for the purposes of wide-scale illumination. In the following decades it was adopted far and wide; newly formed gas companies laid miles upon miles of underground lines beneath urban streets and thoroughfares, supplying a resource that bolstered a variety of nighttime diversions, from theatrical entertainments to window shopping.¹

In the depictions of urban locales like The Hague and Paris that Van Gogh tackled earlier in his artistic career, gas street lamps pop up here and there as signifiers of the modern city. But unlike the Impressionist artists, whose pictures reveled in the evocatively illuminated interiors of Paris’s theaters, bars, and café-concerts, Van Gogh strangely enough tended to represent gas lamps outdoors and during the daytime—that is, as unlit fixtures. They are thus shown devoid of their primary function, like so many mute sentries. It was only after his move to Arles, in the south of France, in 1888 that he began exploring gaslight as a full-blown artistic motif, one that fed into his abiding fascination with the painterly depiction of light and color.²

Vincent van Gogh. Terrace of a Cafe at Night (Place du Forum). 1888

A central aspect of Van Gogh’s exploration of nighttime illumination in Arles is his tendency to pair different light sources, usually one natural and one artificial, in a single scene. This is the case with what appear to be the three oil lamps and single gas fixture that hover over the moody interior of The Night Café, as well as the candle and gas wall sconce that square off in Gauguin’s Chair, a scene set in the artist’s famed Yellow House. And this pairing or relational tendency also found expression in Terrace of a Café at Night, which may have been his very first go at picturing a starry night sky, thus setting the stage for MoMA’s painting. Van Gogh made a curious but decisive choice in how he structured Terrace of a Café at Night: he pushed all the figures way back into the composition, leaving the tables and chairs closer to us empty. With the foreground cleared out, the painting’s emphasis is not on the bustle of human activity but rather on the subject of illumination itself. A single, oversized gas fixture (Van Gogh himself characterized it as “immense”) reaches far out into the scene, perched on a decorative bracket, its yellowish glow contrasted with the twinkling points of light in the celestial firmament above.³

While most observers probably wouldn’t connect Van Gogh’s art with that of the later Italian Futurist movement, which in the first decades of the 20th century celebrated the modern values of speed, motion, and technology, I don’t think it would be off the mark to consider Terrace of a Café at Night as something of an unacknowledged precursor to a work like Giacomo Balla’s Street Light. Here, as in Van Gogh’s earlier scene, two sources of illumination are played against one another, the street lamp at center (which has been identified as an electric fixture) and the moon hovering above. In contrast to Van Gogh’s approach, Balla took pains to cast the artificial element as the dominant one, its intense light veritably drowning out the moon’s narrow crescent, a move in keeping with the Futurists’ generally muscular, boosterish rhetoric around technological advancements. Yet despite such differences, the two artists are connected in their casting of nighttime illumination as a relationship between two contrasting sources of light.

Giacomo Balla. Street Light c. 1910–11 (dated on painting 1909)

That interchange between different types of luminosity—terrestrial and celestial, human and cosmic—is of course one of the central concerns of The Starry Night as well. While the dazzling display of stars in the sky tends to capture the largest share of viewers’ attention, Van Gogh also took care to include all those lighted windows in the village below. Even if those relatively tiny points of light can hardly compete with the scintillating display above, they’re there all the same. We can’t say for sure what sources of illumination brighten those windows. While we know that gaslight was available in Arles during Van Gogh’s stay there, it’s unlikely that at the time he made The Starry Night gaslight had yet arrived in Saint-Rémy, the village that inspired the scene. But to even worry over such details would be to miss the point, since we know that Van Gogh invented, manipulated, or imaginatively combined many of the elements that make up The Starry Night—the size and placement of the cypresses, for instance, or the configuration of the church’s spire. What we can say for sure is that here, too, he was inclined to set up a pairing of, and contrast between, light sources.

Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889

The residents of that humble village seem surprisingly busy, at least given the time of night in which we find ourselves. If we can’t peer into those individual dwellings and discern what sources cast a glow, we can at the very least conclude that activity continues within them, not just in one or two isolated structures but across the village. What’s going on behind those lighted panes? Are some of the inhabitants reading, perhaps from their bibles? Could it be that they’re up late talking? Making love? Or attending to some domestic chores—cooking, cleaning, or washing, perhaps? For more than a few of them, the night seems to be held at bay, activity pushed long into the darkness, a preamble to our own electrified, 24/7 lives. While Van Gogh’s The Starry Night gives us—the painting’s audience, that is—the opportunity to take in those scintillating celestial wonders, then, it leaves it open to question whether any of the village’s inhabitants have stopped to join us, to peer out their windows and turn their gazes upwards. In the modern age, it seems as if there is ever more available to capture our attention, to compete with the wonders of the natural world. Sometimes just looking out the window to take in the view is the last thing that occurs to us. Instead, we bury our heads and stay occupied, focused on matters that are usually much closer at hand.

Michael Lobel is a professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the author of several celebrated books, including most recently, Van Gogh and the End of Nature (2024).