Art experts have long struggled to explain the inspiration behind Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, in which towering cypress trees are depicted against a swirling night sky over a hillside village. Created during his incarceration in an asylum near Saint-Rémy in the south of France, it is one of a series of paintings of cypress trees interpreted as an exploration of abstraction or a mystical evocation of nature.
Now the art historian Prof James Hall, a former Guardian art critic, has a new theory to explain Van Gogh’s fascination with these colossal evergreens: the Eiffel Tower.
He argues that the artist began this series in June 1889, shortly after the Paris monument was unveiled as the star attraction of the International Exposition, whose opening was accompanied by a spectacular late-night show of pyrotechnics, electric light and explosions that he says are repeated in the “pyrotechnical music of the stars, sky and clouds” of Van Gogh’s painting.
Hall said: “For Van Gogh, the cypress tree is a natural alternative to the Eiffel Tower, the centrepiece of the exhibition. Starry Night is a rural and cosmic counterpart to the light show that marked the opening of the exhibition.”
In June 1889, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them. It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk.”
Hall said: “The tower was bombastically marketed as a symbol of French technological prowess, and even more impressive than the pyramids. Van Gogh idealised ancient Egypt, and he thought the cypress tree was as beautiful and well-proportioned as an obelisk.”
Hall, whose previous books include The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History, is a research professor at Southampton University. His research will appear in the April issue of the scholarly Burlington Magazine.
He observes that in 1886, when Van Gogh had just arrived in Paris, a competition to build the monument was launched and won by Gustave Eiffel’s open-lattice wrought-iron feat of engineering, and that its planning and preparation were constantly in the news.
In 1887, a Paris newspaper published a letter signed by leading artists and writers condemning it as a “dizzily ridiculous tower”, and by the time Van Gogh left Paris in February 1888 its construction had risen above the skyline, reaching its first platform.
An 1888 official guide proclaimed that whereas the pyramids were built by slaves for tyrants, this monument was “a manifestation of pure science, august art and liberty of labour”. Newspapers and journals, including Le Monde Illustré, which Van Gogh read in Saint-Rémy, carried “wonderstruck” illustrated reports of the opening.
Hall writes: “Van Gogh’s Starry Night is nature’s and history’s response to Eiffel’s bombastic shuddering metal monster that sought to surpass the Egyptians … The obeliscal cypress dominates Saint-Rémy and its church spire in much the same way that the 300-metre Eiffel Tower dominates Paris.
“The cypress tree was the first part to be painted. Its base is bulked up with a smaller tree, which makes its shape more pyramidal and closer to that of the tower. Something similar happens in Wheatfield with Cypresses, where Van Gogh left a gap between a big and small cypress, and both seem to lean into each other like the tower’s legs.”
In May, the Metropolitan Museum in New York stages the first exhibition devoted to Van Gogh’s fascination with the “flamelike evergreens”, reuniting The Starry Night and Wheat Field with Cypresses, among international loans.
