The Starry Night

The view from Saint-Rémy

In May 1889, after a series of breakdowns, Van Gogh voluntarily entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. From his east-facing bedroom window he could see a walled wheat field, olive groves and the low Alpilles hills. He was not allowed to paint in his bedroom, so he made sketches there and worked on canvases in a ground-floor studio.

The Starry Night, painted in June 1889, began with that view before dawn — but it became something much bigger.

Memory and imagination

The village in the painting is not visible from the asylum window. Van Gogh invented it, and its church spire looks more like the churches of his Dutch childhood than anything in Provence. The cypress in the foreground is also moved closer and made larger than life. The painting is a composite: part observation, part memory, part vision.

The sky

The sky is the subject. Eleven stars burn in halos of yellow and white. A crescent moon glows in the upper right. Through the centre, a great spiral rolls across the sky like a wave. Astronomers have noted that Venus was visible as a bright morning star from Saint-Rémy at the time — it is probably the large white star just right of the cypress.

The cypress

The dark cypress rises like a flame from the bottom of the canvas to the top, linking earth and sky. Cypresses are traditional symbols of death and mourning in Mediterranean cemeteries, but Van Gogh admired them for their shape and wrote that they were as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk.

The brushwork

Everything moves. The paint is laid on thickly in short, curved strokes that follow the forms — circling the stars, rolling through the sky, flickering up the cypress. Up close, you can see ridges of paint that catch the light. This physical texture is what separates a hand-painted reproduction from a flat print.

What did Van Gogh think of it?

Surprisingly little. He mentioned it only briefly in his letters and called it a failure in one of them, frustrated that he had again let himself paint stars too large. He much preferred his work painted directly from nature. History disagreed: it is now one of the most recognised paintings in the world.

Where is the original?

The Starry Night has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941. It measures 73.7 × 92.1 cm, oil on canvas.

Bringing it home

To reproduce The Starry Night, our painters work the sky in thick impasto with loaded brushes, following the rhythm of Van Gogh's strokes so the spirals keep their movement. The result has real relief you can see when light rakes across the surface.