Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône returns to

The painting is on loan for an exhibition that opens this weekend in the Provençal city where the painter became obsessed with the night sky and eventually descended into madness

In September 1888, shortly before he descended into the madness that led him to cut off part of his left ear, Vincent van Gogh completed one of his early starry night paintings. Fascinated by astronomy and the solar system, the insomniac painter had obsessed over the work in his mind, asking a fellow painter: “When shall I ever paint the starry sky, this painting that keeps haunting me?”

Now the scene he finally captured, Starry Night over the Rhône, has been returned to Arles, where he painted it, for the first time in 136 years.