The Starry Night
The Starry Night. Vincent van Gogh. 1889 C.E. Oil on canvas.
The curving, swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky, the brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows, the large, flame-like cypress trees, and the thickly layered brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night are ingrained in the minds of many as an expression of the artist’s turbulent state-of-mind.
- His favored subjects were irises, sunflowers, or wheat fields; night landscapes are rare.
- Van Gogh had had the subject of a blue night sky dotted with yellow stars in mind for many months before he painted The Starry Night; It presented a few technical challenges he wished to confront—namely the use of contrasting color and the complications of painting outdoors at night.
- He was hospitalized in an asylum; mentally ill; painted from his window, it is assumed that Van Gogh composed The Starry Night using elements of a few previously completed works still stored in his studio, as well as aspects from imagination and memory.
- Must have been painted as an amalgamation of several different church spires that Van Gogh had depicted years earlier while living in the Netherlands
- The Starry Night evidences Van Gogh’s extended observation of the night sky. After leaving Paris for more rural areas in southern France, Van Gogh was able to spend hours contemplating the stars without interference from gas or electric city street lights, which were increasingly in use by the late nineteenth century.
- His canvas demonstrates the wide variety of colors he perceived on clear nights. It is this rich mixture of invention, remembrance, and observation combined with Van Gogh’s use of simplified forms, thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors that has made the work so compelling.
- A foundational image for Expressionism as well as perhaps the most famous painting of Van Gogh.