Then comes the river and then comes the burning night sky,

delivered in great pulsing brushstrokes

of heavily-loaded aquamarine.

And the three of them, land, water and sky,

are all melting and dissolving together.

And the second trinity,

the one which really was most important, was that of light.

The gas lamps are just indicated by

a kind of stab of crusty, dark yellow.

And then those gas lamps are reflected

in the second element of the trinity lights.

Beautiful reflections which soften their harshness.

And these kind of fans of heavily-loaded brushstrokes

just fall into the water.

And the third level of the lights

is Ursa Major exploding in the sky.

Taking his brush, he squashes it against the canvas,

and on top of that, another brush loaded with lead white,

and the points go, jab-jab-jab-jab-jab!

And those stars and everything explodes,

and he knows he's got it.

He's got what he's been looking for.

He's got this extraordinary sense of us in the universe,

and this couple of lovers are staring out,

feeling what he wants us to feel.

He said, you don't need to go to church.

The church of the day is this.

This great illumination,

like a burst of beauty from a stained-glass window.

This is the radiance of here and now.

Van Gogh didn't live to see his rapture on canvas become

the new church of colour for untold millions.

His own mind skidded into darkness and self-destruction.

But eventually, one painter would deliver

on Van Gogh's promise of art's redemptive power - Henri Matisse.

But unlike Monet and Van Gogh, Matisse would look not to Japan,