Muppet and Co: oktober 2012

A couple of weeks ago I visited the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It was for my study - Master of Marketing @ Tilburg University - and we were given the opportunity to visit the museum before the museum had opened that day, this was including a guided tour by the head curator of the museum. He told with so much passion and in a very vivid way about the live of van Gogh, that the paintings almost came alive and I just could not resist to share some of my favorite van Gogh paintings, please click on the pictures to view them better/ bigger:

Cafe Terrace at Night, also known as Terrasse du cafe le soir, Place du Forum, Arles, was created in September 1888 in the French town of Arles. Vincent Van Gogh spent his new impressions about the south of France to the front of the painting of a cafe in Arles, Van Gogh Cafe now called. The style of the painting is typical of Van Gogh with warm colors and perspective.

After he had painted it, Van Gogh wrote enthusiastically in a letter to his sister:

"I'm working on a new painting of a cafe at night. On the terrace are small individuals of people drinking. A big yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the street has purple tones. The facades of the houses and a blue sky with stars and with a green tree. it is a night painting become without black but with blue and purple and green and bright greens and lemon yellow. I love to make this right on the spot to paint. Normally I first make a drawing or sketch but now wanted I immediately painting. "

Starry Night Over the Rhone (September 1888) is one of Vincent van Gogh's paintings of Arles at night; it was painted at a spot on the river bank that was only a minute or two's walk from the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine which Van Gogh was renting at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night provided the subject for some of his more famous paintings, including Cafe Terrace at Night (painted earlier the same month) and the later canvas from Saint-Rémy, The Starry Night.Van Gogh announced and described this composition in a letter to his brother Theo:
"Included a small sketch of a 30 square canvas - in short the starry sky painted by night, actually under a gas jet. The sky is aquamarine, the water is royal blue, the ground is mauve. The town is blue and purple. The gas is yellow and the reflections are russet gold descending down to green-bronze. On the aquamarine field of the sky the Great Bear is a sparkling green and pink, whose discreet paleness contrasts with the brutal gold of the gas. Two colourful figurines of lovers in the foreground."

Van Gogh stayed in 1889 and 1890 in a psychiatric hospital in the South of France Saint-Rémy. He worked hard and sought his subjects in nature. After a period of crisis in April 1890 came to an end, threw Van Gogh on the production of single flower still lifes. He painted roses and two canvases with large bouquets of purple irises. One bouquet he set against a pink background, "the other purple bouquet (up to pure carmine and Prussian blue) set against a bright lemon yellow background with different yellow tones in the vase and the pedestal on which it stands, however, is a effect of greatly differing complementary colors that contrast each other by their stronger come true, "he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo.

On January 31, 1890 Theo van Gogh (Vincent's brother) wrote in a letter to Vincent that he had a son whom he named Vincent Willem. Vincent, who had a close relationship with his younger brother, after hearing about the joyful tidings made this painting, of one of his favorite topics, as a gift to his brother: large, flowering branches against a blue sky. As a symbol of the young life Vincent chose the branches of the almond tree, one of the earliest flowering trees in the sunny south in February announcing the spring.