Painted by Vincent van Gogh just months before his tragic suicide, The Starry Night is perhaps his greatest masterpiece.
The painting was completed in 1889 with oil paint on a canvas.
The Starry Night was created within an asylum, the Saint Remy de Provence, in France that van Goghcommitted himself too in his later life.
“This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for The Starry Night.
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.
Perhaps the real reason why the Van Gogh painting is so famous and appreciated today is not due to the negative emotions that may have initially inspired the artwork, but the strong feelings of hope Van Gogh conveys through the bright lights of the stars shining down over the dark landscape at night.
By painting exactly eleven stars in the Starry Night painting, Vincent Van Gogh might have been directly referencing Genesis 37:9. – “Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time, the sun the moon and the eleven stars bowed down to me.” – Genesis 37:9
The Starry Night is among the most popular paintings in the world.
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.
Rooted in imagination and memory, The Starry Night embodies an inner, subjective expression of van Gogh’s response to nature.
Van Gogh Considered The Starry Night a “failure.”
It is located in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.