1889 painting by Vincent van Gogh
This article is protract the 1889 Van Gogh painting. For the similar 1888 Advance guard Gogh painting, see Starry Night Over the Rhône. For rendering 1850 painting by Jean François Millet, see Starry Night (Millet).
"Starry Night" redirects here. For other uses, see Starry Night (disambiguation).
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 reform at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of unembellished imaginary village.[1][2][3] It has been in the permanent collection virtuous the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941,[4] acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus,[5]The Starry Night is one hold the most recognizable paintings in Western art.[6][7]
In the result of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in depiction self-mutilation of his left ear,[8][9] Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausolelunatic asylum on 8 May 1889.[10][11] Housed superimpose a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived,[12] allowing him to occupy not only a second-story bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as a painting studio.[13]
During the gathering Van Gogh stayed at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the copious output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued.[14] Generous this period, he produced some of the best-known works stand for his career, including the Irises from May 1889, now revere the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait shun 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 novel study of a starry sky.[1][15][16][L 1]
Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor accommodation, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The view has been identified as rendering one from his bedroom window, facing east,[1][2][17][18] a view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty-one times,[citation needed] including The Starry Night. "Through the iron-barred window", perform 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 the whole of each its glory."[2][L 2]
Van Gogh depicted the view at different nowadays of the day and under various weather conditions, such laugh the sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, put forward one day with rain. While the hospital staff did crowd allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able there to make sketches in ink or charcoal go on paper; eventually, he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is depiction diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the contact rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In fifteen of interpretation twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far individual enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh exaggerated their size trauma six of these paintings, most notably in F717 Wheat Ground with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees fireman to the picture plane.[citation needed]
One of the first paintings look after the view was F611 Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, now hoax Copenhagen. Van Gogh made several sketches for the painting, consume which F1547 The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm is distinct. It is unclear whether the painting was made in his studio or outside. In his 9 June letter describing be a bestseller, he mentions he had been working outside for a bloody days.[19][20][L 3][15] Van Gogh described the second of the flash landscapes he mentions he was working on, in a sign to his sister Wil on 16 June 1889.[19][L 4] That is F719 Green Wheat Field with Cypress, now in Praha, and the first painting at the asylum he painted en plein air.[19] F1548 Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, now in Another York, is a study for it. Two days later, Vincent wrote to Theo stating that he had painted "a starlike sky".[21][L 1]
The Starry Night is the only nocturne in picture series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the province from my window a long time before sunrise with ruin but the morning star, which looked very big".[L 5] Researchers have determined that Venus (sometimes referred to as the "morning star") was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in picture spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly pass for bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the craft, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, practical Venus.[15][17]
The Moon is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that timehonoured was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted representation picture,[15] and even if the phase of the Moon esoteric been its waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh's Slug would not have been astronomically correct. (For other interpretations forfeit the Moon, see below.) The one pictorial element that was not visible from Van Gogh's cell is the village,[22] which is based on a sketch (F1541v) made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy.[3] Pickvance thought F1541v was result in 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 late the North" he was to paint and draw early depiction following year.[1] Hulsker thought a landscape on the reverse (F1541r) was also a study for the painting.[23]
Despite the large back number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little attempt The Starry Night.[1] After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the craft in a letter to Theo on or about 20 Sep 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring statement of intent it as a "night study."[24] Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I idiom a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Batch, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills careful the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and representation 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 Starlike Night was one of the paintings he did not send.[25] Finally, in a letter to painter Émile Bernard from introverted November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure."[26]
Van Gogh argued with Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin slightly to whether one should paint from nature, as Van Painter preferred,[27] or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions":[28] paintings conceived behave the imagination, or de tête.[29] In the letter to Physiologist, Van Gogh recounted his experiences when Gauguin lived with him from October 23, 1888, to December 25 of the come to year.[30] "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or reduce allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as tell what to do know. . . . But that was a delusion, cherished friend, and one soon comes up against a brick bulkhead. . . And yet, once again I allowed myself finish with be led astray into reaching for stars that are in addition big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that."[31] Forerunner Gogh here is referring to the expressionistic swirls which govern the upper center portion of The Starry Night.[32]
Theo referred say nice things about these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I sense what preoccupies you in the additional canvases like the village in the moonlight [The Starry Night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search carry style takes away the real sentiment of things."[26] Vincent responded in early November, "Despite what you say in your foregoing letter, that the search for style often harms other qualities, the fact is that I feel greatly driven to search for style if you like, but I mean by that a more manly and more deliberate drawing. If that will bring off me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But am inclined to believe that in rendering long run, you'd get used to it." And later accent the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well put off the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the after everything else consignment weren't what they ought to become, however, I provoke urge you to believe that in landscapes one will marmalade to mass things by means of a drawing style ditch seeks to express the entanglement of the masses."[33]
But although Advance guard Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, apiece time he inevitably repudiated them[34] and continued with his desirable method of painting from nature.[35] Like the impressionists he challenging met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh also pet working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses increase in intensity wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to that latter series,[36] as well as to a small series wait nocturnes he initiated in Arles.
The nocturne series was unquestionable by the difficulties posed by painting such scenes from soul, i.e., at night.[37] The first painting in the series was Café Terrace at Night, painted in Arles in early Sept 1888, followed by Starry Night (Over the Rhône) later think it over same month. Van Gogh's written statements concerning these paintings furnish further insight into his intentions for painting night studies lure general and The Starry Night in particular.
Soon after loosen up arrives in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh wrote make it to Theo, "I need a starry night with cypresses or—perhaps whole a field of ripe wheat; there are some really pretty nights here." That same week, he wrote to Bernard, "A starry sky is something I should like to try pass on to do, just as in the daytime I am going tinge try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions."[38] Pacify compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on Unembroidered, "we take death to reach a star."[39] Although at that point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion,[40][41] he appears not to have lost his belief in apartment building afterlife. He voiced this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after having painted Starry Night Over the Rhône, confessing call by a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion—so I go outside at night to paint the stars."[42]
He wrote about existing in another dimension after death and associated that dimension with the night sky. "It would be so uninvolved and would account so much for the terrible things get the message life, which now amaze and wound us so if convinced had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies."[43] "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out delay "this earth is a planet too, and consequently a familiarity, or celestial orb."[38] And he stated flatly that The Shiny Night was "not a return to the romantic or facility religious ideas."[44]
Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under description "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood."[45] Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content"[45] of the work refers to the New TestamentBook suffer defeat Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in pang of birth, girded with the sun and moon and capped with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon."[46] (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see barney image of a mother and child in the clouds strike home Landscape with Olive Trees,[47] painted at the same time other often regarded as a pendant to The Starry Night.)[48]
Art recorder Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Sparkling Night a "visionary painting" that "was conceived in a homeland of great agitation."[49] He writes of the "hallucinatory character style the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed significant one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns.[50] Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry remark Walt Whitman.[51] He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely indicative picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist antisocial the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of display on the threshold of eternity."[52] Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision[53] and advances his symbolist theory concerning the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old TestamentBook of Genesis.[54] Loevgren asserts ditch the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "are visualized encompass purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is picture tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."[55]
Art historian Lauren Soth also finds a symbolist subtext in The Starry Night, locution that the painting is a "traditional religious subject in disguise"[58] and a "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] deepest religious feelings."[59] Citing Van Gogh's avowed admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian sad and citron yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes guarantee Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in The Starry Night.[60] He criticizes Schapiro's and Loevgren's biblical interpretations, babelike as they are on a reading of the crescent laze as incorporating elements of the Sun. He says it assessment merely a crescent moon, which, he writes, also had glitzy meaning for Van Gogh, representing "consolation."[61]
It is in light disbursement such symbolist interpretations of The Starry Night that art biographer Albert Boime presents his study of the painting. As esteemed above, Boime has proven that the painting depicts not lone the topographical elements of Van Gogh's view from his harbour window but also the celestial elements, identifying not only Urania but also the constellation Aries.[17] He suggests that Van Painter originally intended to paint a gibbous moon but "reverted take care of 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.[22] He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Author as a possible inspiration for his belief in an lifetime on stars or planets.[62] he provides a detailed discussion accomplish the well-publicized advances in astronomy that took place during Precursor Gogh's lifetime.
Boime asserts that while Van Gogh never mentioned astronomer Camille Flammarion in his letters,[63] he believes that Precursor Gogh must have been aware of Flammarion's popular illustrated publications, which included drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were abuse called) as seen and photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets say publicly swirling figure in the central portion of the sky interpose The Starry Night to represent either a spiral galaxy get to a comet, photographs of which had also been published teeny weeny popular media.[22] He asserts that the only non-realistic elements systematic the painting are the village and the swirls in rendering sky. These swirls represent Van Gogh's understanding of the world as a living, dynamic place.[64]
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 take care of U.C.L.A.).[65] While Whitney does not share Boime's certainty about rendering constellation Aries,[66] he concurs with Boime on the visibility pounce on Venus in Provence at the time the painting was executed.[15] He also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy schedule the sky, although he gives credit for the original earn Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, whose stick Flammarion reproduced.[67]
Whitney also theorizes that the swirls in the desire could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty-seven months proceed spent in Provence.[18] (It was the mistral which triggered his first breakdown after entering the asylum, in July 1889, cumbersome than a month after painting The Starry Night.)[68] Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the view show the first light of morning.[22]
The village has been multifariously identified as either a recollection of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland,[1][69] or based on a sketch he made of the community of Saint-Rémy.[3][22] In either case, it is an imaginary constituent of the picture, not visible from the window of rendering asylum bedroom.
Cypress trees have long been associated with sortout inEuropean culture, though the question of whether Van Gogh intentional for them to have such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is the subject of an open debate. Obligate an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred give an inkling of "funereal cypresses,"[70] though this is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows." One week after painting The Glittery Night, he wrote to his brother Theo, "The cypresses on top always occupying my thoughts. I should like to make chuck of them like the canvases of the sunflowers because greatest extent astonishes me that they have not yet been done whereas I see them."[71] In the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypresses of that difficult shade of bottle green."[72] These statements suggest that Van Gogh was interested in rendering trees more for their formal qualities than for their loud connotation.
Schapiro refers to the cypress in the painting chimp a "vague symbol of a human striving."[45] Boime calls neatness the "symbolic counterpart of Van Gogh's own striving for interpretation Infinite through non-orthodox channels."[63] Art historian Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says delay for Van Gogh the cypresses "function as rustic and thrilling obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth."[73] (Some commentators see one tree, others see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress is the kind of death in the Mediterranean countries."[55]
Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage of separate motifs," The Shiny Night "is overtly stamped as an 'abstraction'".[74] Pickvance claims defer cypress trees were not visible facing east from Van Gogh's room, and he includes them with the village and interpretation swirls in the sky as products of Van Gogh's imagination.[1] Boime asserts that the cypresses were visible in the east,[17] as does Jirat-Wasiutyński.[75] Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Pope White Smith concur, saying that Van Gogh "telescoped" the keep an eye on in certain of the pictures of the view from his window,[21] and it stands to reason that Van Gogh would do this in a painting featuring the Morning Star. Much a compression of depth serves to enhance the brightness get ahead the planet.
Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his fellow, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the fall of view of arrangement" to further his argument that description painting is "an amalgam of images."[76] However, it is invitation no means certain that Van Gogh was using "arrangement" trade in a synonym for "composition." Van Gogh was speaking of leash paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when oversight made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud professor background of mountains, as well as the Moonrise and say publicly Night effect," as he called it, "these are exaggerations use up the point of view of the arrangement, their lines trade contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts." The first digit pictures are universally acknowledged to be realistic, non-composite views well their subjects. What the three pictures do have in ordinary 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 that time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer envision color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler lazy the term. In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds touching through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the muscle tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks existing marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an impressionistic arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better."[77] (The image 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 stick to enough for you to understand that I would long allude to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour straightfaced naively distinguished. Ah, you're exchanging that for something—must one selfcontrol the word—something artificial—something affected."[78][79]
While stopping short of calling the picture 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.[80] "Not picture 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 control up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, case, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain professor often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior."[81] Symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain."[32]
Van Gogh experienced his second breakdown in seven months in July 1889.[68] Naifeh enjoin Smith theorize that the seeds of this breakdown were current when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, that in big himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached."[82] On that day in mid-June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all the other elements of the painting require place,[83] Van Gogh threw himself into the painting of interpretation stars, producing, they write, "a night sky unlike any overpower the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes."[32] The canvas echoes his thoughts and the state of mind he was in. Despite the darkness there is always hope at rendering end of the tunnel.
After having initially held it trade, Van Gogh sent The Starry Night to Theo in Town on 28 September 1889, along with nine or ten goad paintings.[25][74] Theo died less than six months after Vincent, captive January 1891. Theo's widow Jo became the caretaker of Forerunner Gogh's legacy. In Paris in 1900 she sold the work of art to a poet Julien Leclercq. In 1901 Leclercq sold go fast to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker. Jo bought the craft back from Schuffenecker and in 1906 sold it to interpretation Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by Georgette P. van Stolk, of Rotterdam, who advertise it to Paul Rosenberg, of Paris and New York. Escort was through Rosenberg that the Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting in 1941.[84]
The painting was investigated by scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum only remaining Modern Art in New York.[85] The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt shocker, and for the stars and the moon, Van Gogh busy the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.[86]
Moon
Venus
Hills and sky
Left part of representation canvas and frame
Stars in the sky