Starry Night over the Rhone, 1888 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Vincent van Gogh also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Starry Night over the Rhone is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Three vertical gold bars shiver on the water before anything else resolves: gaslight from Arles stepping across the Rhône in narrow ladders of fire. Between them, strokes of cobalt and ultramarine run leftward and then hook back, as if the river were breathing. Above, stars sit like hammered brass studs, each circled by a small, greenish halo—an observed quirk that only becomes clear when one lingers. On the sandy promontory, a couple leans into the night; their silhouettes steady the scene, human scale set against celestial amplitude.

Vincent van Gogh arrived in Provence obsessed with nocturnes. Letters to Theo and to Emile Bernard make that plain, yet here the preoccupation feels resolved rather than restless. Prussian blue anchors the sky, while ultramarine and cobalt modulate depth; along the quay, orange gas flames accumulate into a low band of heat. Ochres and siennas warm the foreground, where short, darting strokes describe grit and dry sand. Sound is implied—perhaps the light clink of moorings, the muffled sweep of a boat nudging the bank.

Notice how the composition turns on a diagonal recession—from the lovers in the lower right, across the moored skiff and the sliver of beach, to the arc of the town. Instead of a single vanishing point, clustered roofs and a distant steeple create a rhythm of stops and starts, a syncopation that keeps the eye moving. Van Gogh builds this tempo with impasto, setting ridged strokes at slight angles so the surface scintillates even where color darkens. In several stars, a pale citron is laced into the cobalt wet-on-wet; the pigment seems to hum.

From a technical vantage, the brushwork refuses polish. Paint is scraped, dragged, then layered again, the kind of accumulation that records time passing on the surface. Begin with the sky: short, comma-like marks compress space upward; below, longer horizontal pulls calm the water. Compare this serenity to the later New York Starry Night—a storm of spirals, trees shaped like flames. Here the cosmos steadies itself. A better companion is Café Terrace at Night from the same Arles season, where artificial light blooms outward; in the Rhône view it shoots in clean verticals, mirrored and measured.

Context matters. Late nineteenth-century France embraced city illumination, and Arles was no exception. Those gas lamps are modernity’s signature in the picture, almost industrial in their insistence. Yet their rigor is softened by the figures, who seem to pause mid-conversation—lovers, perhaps, or simply walkers who accept the night as richly colored as day. One might imagine a faint mistral easing, the Mediterranean air cooling the skin.

Housed today at the Musée d’Orsay, this canvas shows Vincent van Gogh solving a problem he had set himself: how to paint darkness without surrendering color. He does it by letting cerulean meet umber, by letting complements strike sparks, by making reflection the equal of starlight. After long contemplation, I keep returning to those narrow golden ladders—modern lamps becoming ancient constellations as they cross the river—Van Gogh, van Gogh, quietly staking his claim for a Post-Impressionist Arles that still feels near.