The Starry Night (De sterrennacht) is Vincent van Gogh’s most famous painting and one of the best-known works of modern art. He painted it in June 1889 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, based on the view from his bedroom window: a swirling sky over a sleeping village, with a cypress in the foreground. It is an oil on canvas measuring 73.7 × 92.1 cm, and it is not in Amsterdam or Paris: it has belonged to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York since 1941. It is a different work from Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted nine months earlier in Arles.
The Starry Night meaning: what it shows
The painting shows the sky before dawn over a valley. At the top are about ten stars with halos, a very bright crescent moon in the right-hand corner and, in the center, two great swirls of brushstrokes sweeping across the sky. On the left, a cypress rises from the ground almost to the top edge. Below lies a village with a tall church spire, and the hills of the Alpilles in the background.
The view is the one from the east-facing window of Van Gogh’s bedroom at the asylum, which he painted more than twenty times at different hours. But the painting is not a copy of the landscape: the village, with a church that looks more Dutch than Provençal, could not be seen from there, and the cypress has been moved closer. Van Gogh composed the scene by day, in his studio, from what he had observed before dawn and from his own drawings. The largest star, to the right of the cypress, is Venus, the “morning star,” which shone very brightly before sunrise in June 1889.
Context: Saint-Rémy, June 1889
Van Gogh had admitted himself to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole on May 8, 1889, after his breakdowns in Arles. He had two rooms: a bedroom facing east and a studio on the ground floor. In the first weeks he painted the asylum garden and the irises; in early June he was allowed out to paint the surrounding countryside, and the wheat fields, olive trees and cypresses followed. The idea of a starry night had haunted him for more than a year, since Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône, both from September 1888. The whole period is covered in Saint-Rémy (1889–1890) (in Spanish).
The letters: the morning star and an “abstraction”
In early June 1889 Vincent wrote to Theo (letter 777 on vangoghletters.org, written between May 31 and June 6): “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” A few days later, around June 18, he told him he had “a new study of a starry sky” (letter 782). That study is this painting.
What is surprising is how little Van Gogh thought of it. When he included it in the shipment to Theo in September (letter 805), he called it simply “Night study,” and of that batch he said that apart from a few canvases “the rest says nothing to me.” Theo replied on October 22 (letter 813) that in “the village in the moonlight” he felt that “the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things.” And in November Vincent wrote to Émile Bernard (letter 822) that in Arles, with Gauguin, he had let himself be led into “abstraction,” and that now, “once again,” he was “allowing myself to do stars too big”: a “new setback.” It is his only judgment on this painting, and it is not a kind one. Neither Vincent nor Theo considered it a successful work.
Analysis: sky, cypress and village
The sky in motion
The whole sky is built from short, thick, curved brushstrokes that follow directions: around each star they form concentric halos; in the center, two spirals coil into each other; above the horizon, horizontal waves. Prussian blue, ultramarine and cobalt alternate with yellows and whites without being blended, so the eye does the mixing and the sky vibrates. It is the culmination of what he had tried out in Café Terrace and in the Rhône painting, where the stars were isolated touches: here they are whirlpools.
The cypress as a flame
The cypress fills the full height of the canvas and is painted in greens and blacks with the same undulating brushstroke as the sky, like a dark flame linking it to the earth. That same month Van Gogh wrote to Theo that the cypresses were on his mind, that a cypress was “beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk,” and that “no one has yet done them as I see them” (letter 783). In Wheat Field with Cypresses, painted weeks later, the tree takes center stage again.
The quiet village
Against the restless sky, the village is painted with straight lines and muted colors, and the church spire is the only vertical that answers the cypress. Almost every window has a yellow light. It is the human world, small and calm, under a sky that is anything but. That opposition between sky and village is the axis of the painting, more than any specific symbol.
Fun facts
- An ink drawing. After the painting, Van Gogh made a pen-and-ink copy (F 1540 · JH 1732). It was kept at the Kunsthalle Bremen and, at the end of World War II, was taken to the Soviet Union; today it is part of the disputed Baldin collection. Our catalog has the entry for The Starry Night (drawing).
- From Jo van Gogh-Bonger to MoMA. The painting passed from Theo to his widow Jo, who sold it in 1900; after several owners in France and the Netherlands, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 1941 through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
- The window had bars. Van Gogh’s bedroom at Saint-Paul had iron bars; he mentions his “iron-barred window” to Theo in May 1889 (letter 776). There is no trace of them in the painting.
- Venus and Aries. Studies by the historian Albert Boime and the astronomer Charles Whitney identified Venus and the constellation Aries in the painting’s sky, as they appeared from Saint-Rémy in June 1889; the moon, however, was a waning gibbous, and Van Gogh painted it as a crescent.
Where to see The Starry Night
At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, in gallery 501 on the fifth floor (the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries). It is not at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds much of the Saint-Rémy work, nor at the Orsay, home to the Arles starry night. Van Gogh’s three night skies are therefore in three museums on two continents: Otterlo, Paris and New York. If you want it on your phone or computer, it is among our high-resolution wallpapers.
All the Van Gogh works at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that have an entry on this site, with visitor information: Van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Key facts
| Title | The Starry Night (De sterrennacht / La noche estrellada) |
|---|---|
| Artist | Vincent van Gogh |
| Date and place | Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, June 1889 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 73.7 × 92.1 cm |
| Catalogs | F 612 · JH 1731 |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Acquired in 1941 (Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, by exchange) |
| Period | Saint-Rémy (1889–1890) |
Related works
- Cypresses (drawing, Saint-Rémy, 1889): a drawing related to this work.
- Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888): the Arles night, at the Musée d’Orsay.
- Café Terrace at Night (1888): the first starry sky.
- Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889): the cypress by day.
- Road with Cypress and Star (1890): cypress and stars in his last Saint-Rémy painting.
- Irises (1889): painted at the same asylum a month earlier.
Sources: MoMA’s page for the work (moma.org, no. 79802); letters 776 and 777 (to Theo, May–June 1889), 782 (to Theo, around June 18, 1889), 783 (to Theo, June 25, 1889), 805 (to Theo, on or about September 20, 1889), 813 (Theo to Vincent, October 22, 1889) and 822 (to Émile Bernard, around November 26, 1889), edition by the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, vangoghletters.org; Wikipedia, “The Starry Night.”