Road with Cypress and Star Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

Description of Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Road with Cypresses and a Star

Vincent Van Gogh painted The Road with Cypresses and a Star while he was already in a madhouse near Saint-Rémy. It was the last year of his life, with periods of madness interspersed with periods of enlightenment. Van Gogh produced a hundred and fifty paintings and over a hundred drawings during this last year.

The main paintings of the last year are landscapes and still-lifes, in which the nervous tension combined with dynamism is particularly noticeable. In the painting he describes, there is a long winding road leading past an old hotel with barely visible light in the windows. In the center of the painting is a huge straight cypress, gloomy, like the state of mind of the artist at this period.

The upper part of the canvas is a majestic panorama: tall yellow reeds created by long brush strokes, sharply outlined trees and clouds. The precision and filigree in his work remained with Van Gogh even during the period when he created 2-3 paintings and several drawings in a week.

A psychologist might find in this painting a reflection of the artist’s fears. The road passes the hotel and goes nowhere, the field and the sky vie for unfriendliness. Several people can be seen on the road.

The work is also interesting for astronomers. The artist depicted the new moon, a narrow sickle turned toward the cypress. This is what the moon looked like at the time of the painting in mid-April 1890. On the left, the artist depicted two other objects, Mercury and Venus. Interestingly enough, he drew these two planets in mirror form. However, the moon remained upside down.

This wasn’t Van Gogh’s only experiment with an inverted sky. One of the most famous such paintings is Starry Night, which has a star spiral at its center, resembling a mirror image of a galaxy. Today it’s unlikely to be possible to understand what the inverted sky meant to the artist. He died three months later.