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1889 painting by Vincent van Gogh
the 1889 Van Gogh painting

The Starry Night (De sterrennacht) is an oil on canvas painting by the Dutch Post Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh painted in June 1889. It depicts the view from the east facing window of his asylum room at Saint Rémy de Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art.

In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint Paul de Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. Housed in a former monastery, Saint Paul de Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived, allowing him to occupy not only a second story bedroom but also a ground floor room for use as a painting studio. During the year Van Gogh stayed at the asylum in Saint Rémy de Provence, the prolific output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued. During this period, he produced some of the best known works of his career, including the Irises from May 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self portrait from September 1889, in the Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted mid June by around 18 June, the date he wrote to his brother Theo to say he had a new study of a starry sky.

Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The view has been identified as the one from his bedroom window, facing east, a view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty one times, including The Starry Night. "Through the iron barred window", he wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed square of wheat above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory." One of the first paintings of the view was F611 Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint Rémy, now in Copenhagen. Van Gogh made several sketches for the painting, of which F1547 The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm is typical. It is unclear whether the painting was made in his studio or outside. In his 9 June letter describing it, he mentions he had been working outside for a few days. Van Gogh described the second of the two landscapes he mentions he was working on, in a letter to his sister Wil on 16 June 1889. This is F719 Green Wheat Field with Cypress, now in Prague, and the first painting at the asylum he painted en plein air. Researchers have determined that Venus (sometimes referred to as the "morning star") was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in the spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly as bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is Venus. The Moon is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that it was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the picture, which is based on a sketch (F1541v) made from a hillside above the village of Saint Rémy. Pickvance thought F1541v was done later, and the steeple more Dutch than Provençal, a conflation of several Van Gogh had painted and drawn in his Nuenen period, and thus the first of his "reminisces of the North" he was to paint and draw early the following year.

Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night. Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided to hold back three paintings from this batch to save money on postage, The Starry Night was one of the paintings he did not send. Finally, in a letter to painter Émile Bernard from late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure." Van Gogh argued with Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin as to whether one should paint from nature, as Van Gogh preferred, or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions": paintings conceived in the imagination, or de tête. In the letter to Bernard, Van Gogh recounted his experiences when Gauguin lived with him from October 23, 1888, to December 25 of the same year. "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as you know. . But that was a delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall. And yet, once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that." Van Gogh here is referring to the expressionistic swirls which dominate the upper center portion of The Starry Night. Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight [The Starry Night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things." But although Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them and continued with his preferred method of painting from nature. Like the impressionists he had met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh also favored working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to this latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles. The nocturne series was limited by the difficulties posed by painting such scenes from nature, i. e., at night. The first painting in the series was Café Terrace at Night, painted in Arles in early September 1888, followed by Starry Night (Over the Rhône) later that same month. Van Gogh's written statements concerning these paintings provide further insight into his intentions for painting night studies in general and The Starry Night in particular. Soon after he arrives in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo, "I need a starry night with cypresses or—perhaps above a field of ripe wheat; there are some really beautiful nights here." That same week, he wrote to Bernard, "A starry sky is something I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions." He compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on Earth, "we take death to reach a star." Although at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, he appears not to have lost his belief in an afterlife. He voiced this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after having painted Starry Night Over the Rhône, confessing to a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion—so I go outside at night to paint the stars." He wrote about existing in another dimension after death and associated this dimension with the night sky. "It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies." "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out that "this earth is a planet too, and consequently a star, or celestial orb." Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood." Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content" (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in Landscape with Olive Trees, painted at the same time and often regarded as a pendant to The Starry Night.) Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" that "was conceived in a state of great agitation." He writes of the "hallucinatory character of the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns. Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman. He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never to be forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity." Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision and advances his symbolist theory concerning the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament Book of Genesis. Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries." Art historian Lauren Soth also finds a symbolist subtext in The Starry Night, saying that the painting is a "traditional religious subject in disguise" and a "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] deepest religious feelings." Citing Van Gogh's avowed admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian blue and citron yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes that Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in The Starry Night. He criticizes Schapiro's and Loevgren's biblical interpretations, dependent as they are on a reading of the crescent moon as incorporating elements of the Sun. He says it is merely a crescent moon, which, he writes, also had symbolic meaning for Van Gogh, representing "consolation." It is in light of such symbolist interpretations of The Starry Night that art historian Albert Boime presents his study of the painting. As noted above, Boime has proven that the painting depicts not only the topographical elements of Van Gogh's view from his asylum window but also the celestial elements, identifying not only Venus but also the constellation Aries. he provides a detailed discussion of the well publicized advances in astronomy that took place during Van Gogh's lifetime. Boime asserts that while Van Gogh never mentioned astronomer Camille Flammarion in his letters, he believes that Van Gogh must have been aware of Flammarion's popular illustrated publications, which included drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were then called) as seen and photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets the swirling figure in the central portion of the sky in The Starry Night to represent either a spiral galaxy or a comet, photographs of which had also been published in popular media. Harvard astronomer Charles A. Whitney conducted his astronomical study of The Starry Night contemporaneously with but independent of Boime (who spent almost his entire career at U. C. L. A.). While Whitney does not share Boime's certainty about the constellation Aries, he concurs with Boime on the visibility of Venus in Provence at the time the painting was executed. Whitney also theorizes that the swirls in the sky could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty seven months he spent in Provence. Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the horizon show the first light of morning. or based on a sketch he made of the town of Saint Rémy. though this is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows." One week after painting The Starry Night, he wrote to his brother Theo, "The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them." In the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypresses of that difficult shade of bottle green." These statements suggest that Van Gogh was interested in the trees more for their formal qualities than for their symbolic connotation. Schapiro refers to the cypress in the painting as a "vague symbol of a human striving." (Some commentators see one tree, others see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries." Pickvance claims that cypress trees were not visible facing east from Van Gogh's room, and he includes them with the village and the swirls in the sky as products of Van Gogh's imagination. Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith concur, saying that Van Gogh "telescoped" the view in certain of the pictures of the view from his window, However, it is by no means certain that Van Gogh was using "arrangement" as a synonym for "composition." Van Gogh was speaking of three paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when he made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud and background of mountains, as well as the Moonrise and the Night effect," as he called it, "these are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts." The first two pictures are universally acknowledged to be realistic, non composite views of their subjects. What the three pictures do have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style [that] takes away the real sentiment of things" in The Starry Night. On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term. In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better." (The painting he is referring to is La Berceuse, which is a realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin with an imaginative floral background.) And to Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour so naively distinguished. Ah, you're exchanging that for something—must one say the word—something artificial—something affected." While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy. "Not the kind," they write, "known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse ('the falling sickness', as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy—a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior." Symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain." On that day in mid June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all the other elements of the painting in place, Van Gogh threw himself into the painting of the stars, producing, they write, "a night sky unlike any other the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes."

The painting was investigated by scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and for the stars and the moon, Van Gogh employed the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.