The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · June 1889
You will probably have to work your way through a crowd to see it, but the painting rewards patience. A night sky boils with energy above a small sleeping village: eleven stars and a crescent moon blaze inside halos of light, a great spiral of cloud rolls across the middle of the sky, and on the left a cypress tree rises like a dark flame. Below, the houses of the village huddle around a church spire, quiet and still, as if unaware of the cosmic drama above them.
Van Gogh painted it in June 1889 from memory and imagination, while a patient at the asylum of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint Rémy in Provence. The view from his barred window supplied the hills and the pre-dawn sky he had watched for weeks; the village and the cypress he added from other sketches. Step close and you can see how thick the paint is, laid on in short curved strokes that follow the movement of the forms, so that the sky seems to be in motion even now. The colours are few: ultramarine, cobalt, chrome yellow, white and the near black of the cypress.
The artist was not especially proud of it; he thought it too far from nature and called it a failure in a letter to his brother Theo. It passed through Theo's widow to collectors in the Netherlands and came to New York in 1941, when MoMA acquired it through the Lillie Bliss Bequest. It has since become the most famous painting in the museum and one of the most recognised images in the world. Look for the small window lights in the village, painted in the same yellow as the stars.
Did You Know? Van Gogh painted the scene during the day from memory, since he was not allowed to paint in his bedroom at the asylum where he saw the night sky through the window.
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