Two Great Paintings

Van Gogh painted Starry Night at the end of his life, when he was in Arles, in the South of France. At this time, he also made an iconic painting of the cafe in the Place du Forum in the town, which shows a waiter dressed in white and twelve guests as the tables, one of whom – entirely dressed in black and a sinister figure – is just leaving. There is plenty of interpretation available about this painting online: we learn, for example, that the position of the stars in the sky is always astronomically accurate in Van Gog’s work, and we are reminded to follow the horizontals and verticals of the irregular and regular shapes in order to focus on the wonderful contrast between blazing orange and the deep violet-blue of the cafe paintwork and the even deeper blue of the night sky – which of course, in reality, would not have been this colour. Jared Baxter has suggested that the painting is a coded depiction of ‘The Last Supper’ and based on Leonardo’s famous painting in the Sistine Chapel. The Arles cafe still survives and is still painted in a wonderful deep chrome-gold colour. Meanwhile, Velasquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ is another enigmatic painting, with many hidden secrets. The painter depicts himself at work and the true subject of his portrait are the King and Queen of Spain, seen only in a mirror. The Infanta immediately attracts our gaze, because she is pretty and doll-like, even angelic (blonde, where everyone else is dark-haired) but she is in fact gazing at Velazquez himself, outside the picture and painting the scene for real (while he appears in the artwork as the ‘Court Painter’ with that office’s decorative insignia (actually added after his death by another artist). Both paintings are incomparable masterpieces with hidden messages, but on was painted by a very rich and official artist, the other by one who could almost not afford to buy paint. We can come back to both time and again, admiring the spell and magic which lies behind all great art.