Vincent van Gogh's 1889 most popular and best-remembered painting, with great passion and shattering vehemence: a whirling force catapults across the sky and writhes upward from the earth, where planets burst with their own energy and all the universe surges and pulsates in a release of intolerable vitality. It is built on a great rushing movement from left to right; this movement courses upward through the landscape, into the hills and on into the sky, and floods into the picture like a swollen river in the galaxy beginning at the border on the upper left. But this movement curls back on itself in the center of the picture, then rushes forward again at a reduced pace, and finally curl back once more to join other rhythms instead of running out of the picture. In the rest of the sky, the moon and stars are whirlpools meshing with these major movements. The cypresses rise abruptly as a brake; their own motion, spiraling upward, is another check to the horizontal lunge of earth and sky; a church steeple cuts less conspicuously across the sweep of a hill on the horizon, to the same effect. The moon, largest of the whirlpool of light, is itself a force that sucks the current back into the picture at a point where it would otherwise rush beyond the frame and be lost.
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