The Starry Night by Van Gogh: the Picture, the Place and the Techniques

The Starry Night is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh from June 1889, painted while he was living in a hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France. It shows a swirling night sky over a small town, with a dark cypress in the foreground. The painting has hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941.

Facts

The picture and its history

In May 1889 Vincent van Gogh voluntarily moved to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole hospital in Saint-Rémy, after a mental breakdown in Arles in December 1888. From the window of his room he looked out over a hill and a morning sky, and in June he painted The Starry Night. The picture was not painted on the spot, however. He painted it from memory and imagination in the daytime, and the village and church spire are composed from his memory of the Netherlands.

Van Gogh loved the night and wrote to his brother Theo that the stars made him dream. In 1888 he had already painted night scenes in Arles, among them Starry Night over the Rhône. But in Saint-Rémy the sky became larger and more dramatic than before. The painting became popular only after his death in 1890. During his time in the hospital he painted wheat fields, olive trees and cypresses in the surroundings, and The Starry Night is one of the few night scenes from that period.

Look at the sky

The first thing one sees is the sky: swirls and spirals in blue, yellow and white, with eleven large, glowing stars and a yellow crescent moon. The brushstrokes are short, forceful and visible, and the paint is laid on thickly so that the surface almost feels like a relief. The bright star near the horizon has often been identified as Venus, which shone brightly at dawn in June 1889.

Against the moving sky stands the dark cypress on the left like a flame, sometimes compared to an Egyptian obelisk, and the calm village down in the valley. The church spire points upward but is overwhelmed by the movement of the sky. The contrast between the stillness of the earth and the force of the sky leads many to read the picture as a mixture of longing and unease. In a letter of June 1889 he wrote that the cypresses were constantly on his mind and that he wanted to paint them as he had the sunflowers.

Why these colours and forms

Van Gogh had learned from the Impressionists to use bright colours, but he did not use them to render a moment, as in Impression, Sunrise. He wanted to express feeling. That puts him close to Gauguin and the early Expressionists, and his work is counted as Post-Impressionism; read the guide to Post-Impressionism.

His Sunflowers shows the same thick, expressive paint. Edvard Munch painted a starry night of his own in 1893. Van Gogh’s colour and brushwork influenced the Fauves and the German Expressionists. See also The Scream for another sky full of feeling, and read about Expressionism.

The afterlife

Van Gogh sold almost no pictures in his lifetime. He died after a gunshot in 1890, only 37 years old, and his fame grew only after his death, partly through the published correspondence with Theo. Today The Starry Night is one of the world’s most reproduced images, on posters, mugs, in films and in Don McLean’s 1971 song Vincent, which opens with the words starry, starry night.

The Starry Night is a good example of how a picture can express an inner state without being a realistic landscape. Look for movement, direction and rhythm in the brushstrokes rather than for detail. See also night, sky and landscape as themes, and compare Impressionism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Where did Van Gogh paint The Starry Night?