Starry Night Over the Rhone by Van Gogh Florent Bodart the illustration's clean geometric linework

the illustration's clean geometric linework and flat colour blocking are rendered with exceptional sharpness

its elongated neck and dagger-shaped bill rendered with the meticulous accuracy demanded by nineteenth-century natural history publications

and easy to live with — art that fits rather than asserts

Af Klint structures the composition with an underlying geometry that keeps the apparent fluidity in check: organic and ordered in equal measure

rendered in bold black and white

Starry Night Over the Rhone by Van Gogh Florent Bodart the illustration's clean geometric lineworkStarry Night Over the Rhone predates its more famous sibling by nearly a year, painted in Arles in September 1888. Where the later work churns with interior urgency, this one holds a different quality expansive, almost tender. Gas lamps from the city bank stretch luminous reflections across the river's dark surface, and above, the Great Bear constellation wheels in a sky of deep Prussian blue. Two figures walk at the water's edge. Van Gogh's brushwork