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The Starry Night
Artist	Vincent van Gogh
Year	1889
Catalogue	F612 JH1731 79802
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	73.7 cm × 92.1 cm (29.01 in × 36.26 in)
Location	Museum of Modern Art, New York
Accession	472.1941

The Starry Night 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. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art.

The asylum

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.

The painting

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."

Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of the day and under various weather conditions, such as the sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. While the hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able there to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper; eventually, he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh exaggerated their size in six of these paintings, most notably in F717 Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees closer to the picture plane.

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. F1548 Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, now in New York, is a study for it. Two days later, Vincent wrote to Theo stating that he had painted "a starry sky".

The Starry Night is the only nocturne in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". 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, and even if the phase of the Moon had been its waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh's Moon would not have been astronomically correct. (For other interpretations of the Moon, see below.) The one pictorial element that was not visible from Van Gogh's cell is the village, 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. Hulsker thought a landscape on the reverse (F1541r) was also a study for the painting.

• F1548 Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, Morgan Library & Museum
• F719 Green Wheat Field with Cypress, National Gallery Prague
• F1547 The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm, Van Gogh Museum
• F611 Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
• F1541v Bird's-Eye View of the Village, Van Gogh Museum
• F1541r Landscape with Cypresses, Van Gogh Museum

Interpretations

Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night. After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on or about 20 September 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as a "night study." 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 or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things." Vincent responded in early November, "Despite what you say in your previous letter, that the search for style often harms other qualities, the fact is that I feel greatly driven to seek style if you like, but I mean by that a more manly and more deliberate drawing. If that will make me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But am inclined to believe that in the long run, you'd get used to it." And later in the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the last consignment weren't what they ought to become, however, I dare urge you to believe that in landscapes one will continue to mass things by means of a drawing style that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses."

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." And he stated flatly that The Starry Night was "not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas."

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 inspired by a religious mood." Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content" of the work refers to the New Testament Book of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon." (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 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 suggests that Van Gogh originally intended to paint a gibbous moon but "reverted to a more traditional image" of the crescent moon, and theorizes that the bright aureole around the resulting crescent is a remnant of the original gibbous version. He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne as a possible inspiration for his belief in an afterlife on stars or planets. 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. He asserts that the only non-realistic elements of the painting are the village and the swirls in the sky. These swirls represent Van Gogh's understanding of the cosmos as a living, dynamic place.

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. He also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy in the sky, although he gives credit for the original to Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, whose work Flammarion reproduced.

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. (It was the mistral which triggered his first breakdown after entering the asylum, in July 1889, less than a month after painting The Starry Night.) Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the horizon show the first light of morning.

The village has been variously identified as either a recollection of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland, or based on a sketch he made of the town of Saint-Rémy. In either case, it is an imaginary component of the picture, not visible from the window of the asylum bedroom.

Cypress trees have long been associated with death in European culture, though the question of whether Van Gogh intended for them to have such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is the subject of an open debate. In an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred to "funereal cypresses," 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." Boime calls it the "symbolic counterpart of Van Gogh's own striving for the Infinite through non-orthodox channels." Art historian Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Van Gogh the cypresses "function as rustic and natural obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth." (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."

Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage of separate motifs," The Starry Night "is overtly stamped as an 'abstraction'". 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. Boime asserts that the cypresses were visible in the east, as does Jirat-Wasiutyński. 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, and it stands to reason that Van Gogh would do this in a painting featuring the Morning Star. Such a compression of depth serves to enhance the brightness of the planet.

Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgam of images." 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 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."

Van Gogh experienced his second breakdown in seven months in July 1889. Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of this breakdown were present when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, that in giving himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached." 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 echoes his thoughts and the state of mind he was in. Despite the darkness there is always hope at the end of the tunnel.

Provenance

After having initially held it back, Van Gogh sent The Starry Night to Theo in Paris on 28 September 1889, along with nine or ten other paintings. Theo died less than six months after Vincent, in January 1891. Theo's widow Jo became the caretaker of Van Gogh's legacy. In Paris in 1900 she sold the painting to a poet Julien Leclercq. In 1901 Leclercq sold it to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker. Jo bought the painting back from Schuffenecker and in 1906 sold it to the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by Georgette P. van Stolk, of Rotterdam, who sold it to Paul Rosenberg, of Paris and New York. It was through Rosenberg that the Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting in 1941.

Painting materials

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.

• Details of Van Gogh's The Starry Night exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of New York.
• Moon
• Venus
• Hills and sky
• Left part of the canvas and frame
• Stars in the sky

See also

• List of works by Vincent van Gogh
• "Vincent", 1971 song by Don McLean written as a tribute to Vincent van Gogh
• Timbres, espace, mouvement: an orchestral work (1978) by Henri Dutilleux inspired by the painting

References

Citations

1. ^ Pickvance 1986, p. 103
2. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 747
3. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 760
4. "Where is The Starry Night?". Van Gogh Museum. Retrieved 1 October 2024.
5. "Vincent van Gogh Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works". The Art Story. Retrieved 12 June 2015. Starry Night is often considered to be Van Gogh's pinnacle achievement.
6. Moyer, Edward (14 February 2012). "Interactive canvas lets viewers stir Van Gogh's 'Starry Night'". CNET News. Retrieved 12 June 2015. ...one of the West's most iconic paintings: Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night."
7. Kim, Hannah (27 May 2010). "Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, now pocket-sized!". MoMA. Retrieved 12 June 2015. Instantly recognizable and an iconic image in our culture, Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night is a touchstone of modern art and one of the most beloved works...
8. Naifeh & Smith 2011, pp. 701–7
9. Pickvance 1984, p. 159
10. Naifeh & Smith 2011, pp. 741–3
11. Pickvance 1986, pp. 25–6
12. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 746
13. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 754
14. Naifeh & Smith 2011, pp. 592, 778
15. ^ Whitney 1986, p. 356
16. Naifeh & Smith 2011, pp. 759–61
17. ^ Boime 1984, p. 88
18. ^ Whitney 1986, p. 358
19. ^ Hulsker 1986, p. 394
20. Pickvance 1986, p. 93
21. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 759
22. ^ Boime 1984, p. 89
23. Hulsker 1986, p. 396
24. Van Gogh Letters Project, no. 805
25. ^ Van Gogh Letters Project, no. 806
26. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 784
27. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 755
28. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 625n
29. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 674
30. Gayford, Martin (2006). The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 11, 286. ISBN 978-0-618-99058-0.
31. de Leeuw, Ronald, ed. (1996). The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. London: Penguin Books. p. 469. ISBN 978-0-140-44674-6.
32. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 762
33. Van Gogh Letters Project, no. 816
34. Naifeh & Smith 2011, pp. 626, 680
35. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 778
36. Schapiro, Meyer (1950). Vincent van Gogh. New York: H. N. Abrams. p. 110.
37. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 650
38. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 649
39. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 611
40. Soth 1986, p. 301
41. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 766
42. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 651
43. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 858n
44. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 767
45. ^ Schapiro, p. 100
46. Schapiro, p. 33
47. Schapiro, p. 108
48. Pickvance 1986, p. 101
49. Loevgren 1971, p. 172
50. Loevgren 1971, pp. 172–73
51. Loevgren 1971, p. 181
52. Loevgren 1971, p. 182
53. Loevgren 1971, p. 183
54. Loevgren 1971, p. 186
55. ^ Loevgren 1971, p. 184
56. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute: Cypresses in Starry Night Archived 10 January 2013 at archive.today in the Lost Art digital collection. Retrieved 3 June 2012.
57. Richard Boudreaux: "Ex-Soviet Officer Tried to Return Art Found in Cellar", Los Angeles Times 20 March 1995, retrieved 3 June 2012.
58. Soth 1986, p. 308
59. Soth 1986, p. 312
60. Soth 1986, p. 307
61. Soth 1986, p. 309
62. Boime 1984, p. 95
63. ^ Boime 1984, p. 96
64. Boime 1984, p. 92
65. Rourke, Mary (23 October 2008). "Art historian viewed works from social, political standpoints". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
66. Whitney 1986, p. 352
67. Whitney 1986, p. 351
68. ^ Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 771
69. Schapiro, p. 34
70. Pickvance 1984, p. 181
71. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 758
72. Van Gogh Letters Project, no. 783
73. Jirat-Wasiutynski, p. 657
74. ^ Pickvance 1986, p. 106
75. Jirat-Wasiutynski, p. 667
76. Soth 1986, p. 305
77. Van Gogh Letters Project, no. 739
78. Van Gogh Letters Project, no. 822
79. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 675
80. Naifeh & Smith 2011, pp. 762–763
81. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 749; emphasis in the original
82. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 763
83. Naifeh & Smith 2011, p. 761
84. "The Provenance Research Project". Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
85. Yonghui Zhao, Roy S. Berns, Lawrence A. Taplin, James Coddington, An Investigation of Multispectral Imaging for the Mapping of Pigments in Paintings, in Proc. SPIE 6810, Computer Image Analysis in the Study of Art, 681007 (29 February 2008)
86. Van Gogh, The Starry Night, illustrated pigment analysis, ColourLex

Letters

1. ^ "Letter 782:To Theo van Gogh. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, on or about Tuesday, 18 June 1889". Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum. 1v:2. Archived from the original on 14 October 2023. At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky.
2. "Letter 776: To Theo van Gogh. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, on or about Thursday, 23 May 1889". Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum. 1v:2. Archived from the original on 14 October 2023. Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective in the manner of Van Goyen, above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory.
3. "Letter 779: To Theo van Gogh. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Sunday, 9 June 1889". Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum. 1v:2. Archived from the original on 14 October 2023. ... for a few days now I've been going outside to work in the neighbourhood... One is the countryside that I glimpse from the window of my bedroom. In the foreground, a field of wheat, ravaged and knocked to the ground after a storm. A boundary wall and beyond, grey foliage of a few olive trees, huts and hills. Finally, at the top of the painting a large white and grey cloud swamped by the azure. It's a landscape of extreme simplicity — in terms of colouration as well.
4. "Letter 780: To Willemien van Gogh. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Sunday, 16 June 1889". Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum. 1r:1. Archived from the original on 14 October 2023. Then yet another that depicts a field of yellowing wheat surrounded by brambles and green bushes. At the end of the field, a little pink house with a tall and dark cypress tree that stands out against the distant purplish and bluish hills, and against a forget-me-not blue sky streaked with pink whose pure tones contrast with the already heavy, scorched ears, whose tones are as warm as the crust of a loaf of bread.
5. "Letter 777: To Theo van Gogh. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, between about Friday, 31 May and about Thursday, 6 June 1889". Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum. 1v:2. Archived from the original on 14 October 2023. This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.

Sources

• Boime, Albert (December 1984). "Van Gogh's Starry Night: A History of Matter and a Matter of History" (PDF). Arts Magazine. 59 (4): 86–103. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 November 2018. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
• De La Faille, Jacob Baart (1970). The works of Vincent van Gogh (3rd ed.). Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. OCLC 300160639.
• Hulsker, Jan (1986). The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches. New York, NY: Harrison House/Harry N. Abrams Distributed by Crown Publishers, Random House. ISBN 0-517-44867-X.
• Jirat-Wasiutynski, Vojtech (December 1993). "Vincent van Gogh's Paintings of Olive Trees and Cypresses from St.-Remy". Art Bulletin. 75 (4): 647–670. doi:10.2307/3045988. JSTOR 3045988.
• Loevgren, Sven (1971). The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and French Symbolism in the 1880s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0253325600.
• Naifeh, Steven and Gregory White Smith (2011). Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-50748-9.
• Pickvance, Ronald (1984). Van Gogh in Arles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0-87099-376-3.
• Pickvance, Ronald (1986). Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers (exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Abrams. ISBN 0-87099-477-8.
• Soth, Lauren (June 1986). "Van Gogh's Agony". Art Bulletin. 68 (2): 301. doi:10.1080/00043079.1986.10788341. S2CID 192138073.
• Whitney, Charles A. (September 1986). "The Skies of Vincent van Gogh". Art History. 9 (3): 351–362. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.1986.tb00206.x.

External links

• The Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art
• The Starry Night at Who is van Gogh
• Van Gogh, paintings and drawings: a special loan exhibition, a fully digitized exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries, which contains material on this painting (see index)
• Aerial photo of monastery marking Vincent's bedroom Archived 24 April 2017 at the Wayback Machine
• Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, ColourLex
• "12 Most Famous Paintings in History", paintandpainting.com

v t e Modernism
Movements	Acmeism Art Deco Art Nouveau Ashcan School Constructivism Cubism Dada Expressionism Der Blaue Reiter Die Brücke Music Fauvism Functionalism Bauhaus Futurism Imagism Lettrism Neoplasticism De Stijl Orphism Surrealism Symbolism Synchromism Tonalism
Literary arts	Literature Apollinaire Barnes Beckett Bely Breton Broch Bulgakov Chekhov Conrad Döblin Forster Faulkner Flaubert Ford Gide Hamsun Hašek Hemingway Hesse Joyce Kafka Koestler Lawrence Mann Mansfield Marinetti Musil Dos Passos Platonov Porter Proust Stein Svevo Unamuno Woolf Poetry Akhmatova Aldington Auden Cavafy Cendrars Crane H.D. Desnos Eliot Éluard Elytis George Jacob Lorca Lowell (Amy) Lowell (Robert) Mallarmé Moore Owen Pessoa Pound Rilke Seferis Stevens Thomas Tzara Valéry Williams Yeats Works In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) The Metamorphosis (1915) Ulysses (1922) The Waste Land (1922) The Magic Mountain (1924) Mrs Dalloway (1925) The Sun Also Rises (1926) The Master and Margarita (1928–1940) The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Visual arts	Painting Albers Arp Balthus Bellows Boccioni Bonnard Brâncuși Braque Calder Cassatt Cézanne Chagall Chirico Claudel Dalí Degas Kooning Delaunay Delaunay Demuth Dix Doesburg Duchamp Dufy Ensor Ernst Gauguin Giacometti Goncharova Gris Grosz Höch Hopper Kahlo Kandinsky Kirchner Klee Kokoschka Léger Magritte Malevich Manet Marc Matisse Metzinger Miró Modigliani Mondrian Monet Moore Munch Nolde O'Keeffe Picabia Picasso Pissarro Ray Redon Renoir Rodin Rousseau Schiele Seurat Signac Sisley Soutine Steichen Stieglitz Toulouse-Lautrec Van Gogh Vuillard Wood Film Akerman Aldrich Antonioni Avery Bergman Bresson Buñuel Carné Cassavetes Chaplin Clair Cocteau Dassin Deren Dovzhenko Dreyer Edwards Eisenstein Epstein Fassbinder Fellini Flaherty Ford Fuller Gance Godard Hitchcock Hubley Jones Keaton Kubrick Kuleshov Kurosawa Lang Losey Lupino Marker Minnelli Murnau Ozu Pabst Pudovkin Ray (Nicholas) Ray (Satyajit) Resnais Renoir Richardson Rossellini Sirk Sjöström Sternberg Tarkovsky Tati Trnka Truffaut Varda Vertov Vigo Welles Wiene Wood Architecture Breuer Bunshaft Gaudí Gropius Guimard Horta Hundertwasser Johnson Kahn Le Corbusier Loos Melnikov Mendelsohn Nervi Neutra Niemeyer Rietveld Saarinen Steiner Sullivan Tatlin Mies Wright Works A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) Mont Sainte-Victoir (1887) The Starry Night (1889) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) The Dance (1909–1910) Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) Black Square (1915) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) Ballet Mécanique (1923) Battleship Potemkin (1925) Metropolis (1927) Un Chien Andalou (1929) Villa Savoye (1931) Fallingwater (1936) Citizen Kane (1941) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Performing arts	Music Antheil Bartók Berg Berio Boulanger Boulez Copland Debussy Dutilleux Falla Feldman Górecki Hindemith Honegger Ives Janáček Ligeti Lutosławski Milhaud Nono Partch Russolo Satie Schaeffer Schoenberg Scriabin Stockhausen Strauss Stravinsky Szymanowski Varèse Villa-Lobos Webern Weill Theatre Anderson Anouilh Artaud Beckett Brecht Chekhov Ibsen Jarry Kaiser Maeterlinck Mayakovsky O'Casey O'Neill Osborne Pirandello Piscator Strindberg Toller Wedekind Wilder Witkiewicz Dance Balanchine Cunningham Diaghilev Duncan Fokine Fuller Graham Holm Laban Massine Nijinsky Shawn Sokolow St. Denis Tamiris Wiesenthal Wigman Works Don Juan (1888) Ubu Roi (1896) Verklärte Nacht (1899) Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) Salome (1905) The Firebird (1910) Afternoon of a Faun (1912) The Rite of Spring (1913) Fountain (1917) Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) The Threepenny Opera (1928) Waiting for Godot (1953)
Related	American modernism Armory Show Avant-garde Ballets Russes Bloomsbury Group Buddhist modernism Classical Hollywood cinema Degenerate art Ecomodernism Experimental film Film noir Fourth dimension in art Fourth dimension in literature Grosvenor School of Modern Art Hanshinkan Modernism High modernism Hippie modernism Impressionism Music Literature Post- Incoherents International Style Late modernism Late modernity List of art movements List of avant-garde artists List of modernist poets Maximalism Modernity Neo-primitivism Neo-romanticism New Hollywood New Objectivity Poetic realism Pulp noir Reactionary modernism Metamodernism Remodernism Second Viennese School Structural film Underground film Vulgar modernism
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• 1889 paintings
• Paintings by Vincent van Gogh
• Paintings in the Museum of Modern Art (New York City)
• Paintings of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by Vincent van Gogh
• Churches in art
• Moon in art
• Paintings of Venus (planet)
• Oil on canvas paintings
• Night in culture