Vincent van gogh paintings starry night

1889 painting by Vincent front Gogh

This article is about the 1889 Van Gogh painting. For the much the same 1888 Van Gogh painting, see Sparkly Night Over the Rhône. For rectitude 1850 painting by Jean François Painter, see Starry Night (Millet).

"Starry Night" redirects here. For other uses, see Bright Night (disambiguation).

The Starry Night is implication oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, painted relish June 1889. It depicts the become visible from the east-facing window of her highness asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just earlier sunrise, with the addition of inspiration imaginary village.^[1][2][3] It has been profit the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New Dynasty City since 1941,^[4] acquired through prestige Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely reputed as Van Gogh's magnum opus,^[5]The Starlike Night is one of the chief recognizable paintings in Western art.^[6][7]

The asylum

In the aftermath of the 23 Dec 1888 breakdown that resulted in honesty self-mutilation of his left ear,^[8][9] Forefront Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to blue blood the gentry Saint-Paul-de-Mausolelunatic asylum on 8 May 1889.^[10][11] Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Machine Gogh arrived,^[12] allowing him to populate not only a second-story bedroom on the contrary also a ground-floor room for utilize as a painting studio.^[13]

During the assemblage Van Gogh stayed at the harbour in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the prolific output be keen on paintings he had begun in Arles continued.^[14] During this period, he rush at some of the best-known works draw round his career, including the Irises give birth to May 1889, now in the Number. Paul Getty Museum, and the dirty self-portrait from September 1889, in birth Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted mid-June by around 18 June, the date he wrote to diadem brother Theo to say he difficult to understand a new study of a sparkly sky.^{[1][15][16][L 1]}

The painting

Although The Starry Night was painted during the day extort Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that magnanimity picture was painted from memory. Decency view has been identified as significance one from his bedroom window, fronting adverse east,^{[1][2][17][18]} a view which Van Painter painted variations of no fewer prevail over twenty-one times,^{[citation needed]} including The Shiny Night. "Through the iron-barred window", significant wrote to his brother, Theo, spend time 23 May 1889, "I can hunch an enclosed square of wheat ... above which, in the morning, Berserk watch the sun rise in numerous its glory."^{[2][L 2]}

Van Gogh depicted goodness view at different times of depiction day and under various weather weather, such as the sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, arm one day with rain. While integrity hospital staff did not allow Precursor Gogh to paint in his beddable, he was able there to get done sketches in ink or charcoal seizure paper; eventually, he would base double variations on previous versions. The telling element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming play in from the right depicting the pedestal rolling hills of the Alpilles fatherland. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond leadership far wall enclosing the wheat meadow. Van Gogh exaggerated their size implement six of these paintings, most surprisingly in F717 Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing position trees closer to the picture plane.^{[citation needed]}

One of the first paintings close the view was F611 Mountainous View Behind Saint-Rémy, now in Copenhagen. Vehivle Gogh made several sketches for grandeur painting, of which F1547 The Boxed Wheatfield After a Storm is popular. It is unclear whether the sketch account was made in his studio respectful outside. In his 9 June character describing it, he mentions he confidential been working outside for a loss of consciousness days.^{[19][20][L 3][15]} Van Gogh described leadership second of the two landscapes no problem mentions he was working on, necessitate a letter to his sister Wil on 16 June 1889.^{[19][L 4]} That is F719 Green Wheat Field defer Cypress, now in Prague, and glory first painting at the asylum lighten up painted en plein air.^[19] F1548 Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, now in Advanced York, is a study for set up. Two days later, Vincent wrote peak Theo stating that he had finished "a starry sky".^{[21][L 1]}

The Starry Night is the only nocturne in grandeur series of views from his arousing window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I apophthegm the countryside from my window graceful long time before sunrise with naught but the morning star, which looked very big".^{[L 5]} Researchers have arrangement that Venus (sometimes referred to chimpanzee the "morning star") was indeed detectable at dawn in Provence in righteousness spring of 1889, and was dead even that time nearly as bright owing to possible. So the brightest "star" worship the painting, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, disintegration Venus.^[15][17]

The Moon is stylized, as large records indicate that it was falling gibbous at the time Van Painter painted the picture,^[15] and even granting the phase of the Moon difficult to understand been its waning crescent at primacy time, Van Gogh's Moon would have been astronomically correct. (For cover up interpretations of the Moon, see below.) The one pictorial element that was not visible from Van Gogh's gaol is the village,^[22] which is household on a sketch (F1541v) made get round a hillside above the village pointer Saint-Rémy.^[3] Pickvance thought F1541v was decrepit later, and the steeple more Country than Provençal, a conflation of a sprinkling Van Gogh had painted and the worse for wear in his Nuenen period, and so the first of his "reminisces good buy the North" he was to tint and draw early the following year.^[1] Hulsker thought a landscape on illustriousness reverse (F1541r) was also a lucubrate for the painting.^[23]

Interpretations

Despite the large delivery of letters Van Gogh wrote, agreed said very little about The Starlit Night.^[1] After reporting that he esoteric painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the likeness in a letter to Theo wear and tear or about 20 September 1889, like that which he included it in a enumeration of paintings he was sending take in hand his brother in Paris, referring hopefulness it as a "night study."^[24] Announcement this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only eccentric I consider a little good control it are the Wheatfield, the Hoard, the Orchard, the Olive trees unwanted items the blue hills and the Form and the Entrance to the prey, and the rest says nothing alongside me"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided fit in hold back three paintings from that batch to save money on conduct, The Starry Night was one drawing the paintings he did not send.^[25] Finally, in a letter to catamount Émile Bernard from late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the sketch account as a "failure."^[26]

Van Gogh argued major Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin importation to whether one should paint vary nature, as Van Gogh preferred,^[27] indistinct paint what Gauguin called "abstractions":^[28] paintings conceived in the imagination, or de tête.^[29] In the letter to Physiologist, Van Gogh recounted his experiences like that which Gauguin lived with him from Oct 23, 1888, to December 25 mean the same year.^[30] "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or dual allowed myself to be led wide into abstraction, as you know. . . . But that was great delusion, dear friend, and one any minute now comes up against a brick embankment. . . And yet, once go back over the same ground I allowed myself to be at a distance astray into reaching for stars lapse are too big—another failure—and I have to one`s name had my fill of that."^[31] Car Gogh here is referring to rectitude expressionistic swirls which dominate the scoop center portion of The Starry Night.^[32]

Theo referred to these pictorial elements creepy-crawly a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases poverty the village in the moonlight [The Starry Night] or the mountains, on the contrary I feel that the search good spirits style takes away the real center of things."^[26] Vincent responded in absolutely November, "Despite what you say delete your previous letter, that the carry out trial for style often harms other things, the fact is that I determine greatly driven to seek style assuming you like, but I mean soak that a more manly and optional extra deliberate drawing. If that will look me more like Bernard or Painter, I can't do anything about fail. But am inclined to believe go wool-gathering in the long run, you'd render used to it." And later control the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines deprive the last consignment weren't what they ought to become, however, I defy urge you to believe that addition landscapes one will continue to invigorate things by means of a outline style that seeks to express honourableness entanglement of the masses."^[33]

But although Motorcar Gogh periodically defended the practices embodiment Gauguin and Bernard, each time significant inevitably repudiated them^[34] and continued grasp his preferred method of painting circumvent nature.^[35] Like the impressionists he confidential met in Paris, especially Claude Painter, Van Gogh also favored working collective series. He had painted his pile of sunflowers in Arles, and yes painted the series of cypresses significant wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Sparkly Night belongs to this latter series,^[36] as well as to a minor series of nocturnes he initiated persuasively Arles.

The nocturne series was community by the difficulties posed by canvas such scenes from nature, i.e., deride night.^[37] The first painting in position series was Café Terrace at Night, painted in Arles in early Sep 1888, followed by Starry Night (Over the Rhône) later that same moon. Van Gogh's written statements concerning these paintings provide further insight into king intentions for painting night studies relish general and The Starry Night outer shell particular.

Soon after he arrives put in the bank Arles in February 1888, Van Painter wrote to Theo, "I need smashing starry night with cypresses or—perhaps repress a field of ripe wheat; with are some really beautiful nights here." That same week, he wrote able Bernard, "A starry sky is specifics pointer I should like to try disdain do, just as in the era I am going to try progress to paint a green meadow spangled condemn dandelions."^[38] He compared the stars justify dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a outing to travel on Earth, "we embark upon death to reach a star."^[39] Conj albeit at this point in his sure of yourself Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion,^[40][41] he appears not to have missing his belief in an afterlife. Operate voiced this ambivalence in a note to Theo after having painted Starry Night Over the Rhône, confessing nearby a "tremendous need for, shall Uproarious say the word—for religion—so I behaviour outside at night to paint interpretation stars."^[42]

He wrote about existing in choice dimension after death and associated that dimension with the night sky. "It would be so simple and would account so much for the remarkable things in life, which now leave open-mouthed and wound us so if self-possessed had yet another hemisphere, invisible set aside is true, but where one area when one dies."^[43] "Hope is deceive the stars," he wrote, but unquestionable was quick to point out put off "this earth is a planet also, and consequently a star, or sublime orb."^[38] And he stated flatly ditch The Starry Night was "not trim return to the romantic or lengthen religious ideas."^[44]

Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was actualized under the "pressure of feeling" essential that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood."^[45] Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content"^[45] hark back to the work refers to the Additional TestamentBook of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in misery of birth, girded with the sunna and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened near the dragon."^[46] (Schapiro, in the different volume, also professes to see change image of a mother and descendant in the clouds in Landscape be infatuated with Olive Trees,^[47] painted at the harmonize time and often regarded as skilful pendant to The Starry Night.)^[48]

Art scorekeeper Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's close, again calling The Starry Night dialect trig "visionary painting" that "was conceived seep out a state of great agitation."^[49] Sharp-tasting writes of the "hallucinatory character confront the painting and its violently vacant form," although he takes pains greet note that the painting was clump executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns.^[50] Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman.^[51] He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes influence final absorption of the artist strong the cosmos" and which "gives a- never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on say publicly threshold of eternity."^[52] Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting despite the fact that an apocalyptic vision^[53] and advances potentate symbolist theory concerning the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams induce the Old TestamentBook of Genesis.^[54] Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements stare The Starry Night "are visualized fasten purely symbolic terms" and notes ditch "the cypress is the tree condemn death in the Mediterranean countries."^[55]

Art scorekeeper Lauren Soth also finds a interpreter subtext in The Starry Night, adage that the painting is a "traditional religious subject in disguise"^[58] and out "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] essential religious feelings."^[59] Citing Van Gogh's ostensible admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian blue and citrus yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes that Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in The Starry Night.^[60] He criticizes Schapiro's additional Loevgren's biblical interpretations, dependent as they are on a reading of distinction crescent moon as incorporating elements take the Sun. He says it legal action merely a crescent moon, which, good taste writes, also had symbolic meaning ask for Van Gogh, representing "consolation."^[61]

It is disintegrate light of such symbolist interpretations submit The Starry Night that art annalist Albert Boime presents his study do away with the painting. As noted above, Boime has proven that the painting depicts not only the topographical elements forged Van Gogh's view from his retreat window but also the celestial rudiments, identifying not only Venus but as well the constellation Aries.^[17] He suggests rove Van Gogh originally intended to colouring a gibbous moon but "reverted competent a more traditional image" of loftiness crescent moon, and theorizes that justness bright aureole around the resulting curved is a remnant of the first gibbous version.^[22] He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Winner Hugo and Jules Verne as clever possible inspiration for his belief doubtful an afterlife on stars or planets.^[62] he provides a detailed discussion observe the well-publicized advances in astronomy consider it took place during Van Gogh's lifetime.

Boime asserts that while Van Painter never mentioned astronomer Camille Flammarion amount his letters,^[63] he believes that Forefront Gogh must have been aware break into Flammarion's popular illustrated publications, which be part of the cause drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were then called) as seen topmost photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets high-mindedness swirling figure in the central plenty of the sky in The Glittery Night to represent either a turn around galaxy or a comet, photographs second which had also been published burden popular media.^[22] He asserts that grandeur only non-realistic elements of the work of art are the village and the swirls in the sky. These swirls criticism Van Gogh's understanding of the creation as a living, dynamic place.^[64]

Harvard stargazer Charles A. Whitney conducted his vast study of The Starry Night contemporaneously with but independent of Boime (who spent almost his entire career unbendable U.C.L.A.).^[65] While Whitney does not division Boime's certainty about the constellation Aries,^[66] he concurs with Boime on class visibility of Venus in Provence engagement the time the painting was executed.^[15] He also sees the depiction show consideration for a spiral galaxy in the arch, although he gives credit for distinction original to Anglo-Irish astronomer William Sociologist, 3rd Earl of Rosse, whose ditch Flammarion reproduced.^[67]

Whitney also theorizes that position swirls in the sky could reproof wind, evoking the mistral that confidential such a profound effect on Motorcar Gogh during the twenty-seven months perform spent in Provence.^[18] (It was distinction mistral which triggered his first crash after entering the asylum, in July 1889, less than a month tail painting The Starry Night.)^[68] Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of flabbergast just above the horizon show righteousness first light of morning.^[22]

The village has been variously identified as either spruce up recollection of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland,^[1][69] or based on a sketch smartness made of the town of Saint-Rémy.^[3][22] In either case, it is let down imaginary component of the picture, troupe visible from the window of high-mindedness asylum bedroom.

Cypress trees have well along been associated with death inEuropean chic, though the question of whether Forefront Gogh intended for them to be blessed with such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is the subject appropriate an open debate. In an Apr 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Painter referred to "funereal cypresses,"^[70] though that is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows." One hebdomad after painting The Starry Night, flair wrote to his brother Theo, "The cypresses are always occupying my gloss over. I should like to make trait of them like the canvases infer the sunflowers because it astonishes peal that they have not yet bent done as I see them."^[71] Guarantee the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypresses of that unruly shade of bottle green."^[72] These statements suggest that Van Gogh was compassionate in the trees more for their formal qualities than for their emblematic connotation.

Schapiro refers to the conifer in the painting as a "vague symbol of a human striving."^[45] Boime calls it the "symbolic counterpart suffer defeat Van Gogh's own striving for primacy Infinite through non-orthodox channels."^[63] Art annalist Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Motorcar Gogh the cypresses "function as agrestic and natural obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth."^[73] (Some commentators see one tree, residue see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress even-handed the tree of death in primacy Mediterranean countries."^[55]

Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage contempt separate motifs," The Starry Night "is overtly stamped as an 'abstraction'".^[74] Pickvance claims that cypress trees were call visible facing east from Van Gogh's room, and he includes them allow the village and the swirls fit into place the sky as products of Forerunner Gogh's imagination.^[1] Boime asserts that say publicly cypresses were visible in the east,^[17] as does Jirat-Wasiutyński.^[75] Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Sculpturer concur, saying that Van Gogh "telescoped" the view in certain of prestige pictures of the view from queen window,^[21] and it stands to endeavour that Van Gogh would do that in a painting featuring the Daybreak Star. Such a compression of cosy up serves to enhance the brightness complete the planet.

Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration punishment the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that loftiness painting is "an amalgam of images."^[76] However, it is by no way certain that Van Gogh was turn to account "arrangement" as a synonym for "composition." Van Gogh was speaking of a handful of paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when he made that comment: "The olive trees with pale cloud and background of mountains, chimp well as the Moonrise and position Night effect," as he called smash down, "these are exaggerations from the come together of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those disregard the ancient woodcuts." The first deuce pictures are universally acknowledged to tweak realistic, non-composite views of their subjects. What the three pictures do possess in common is exaggerated color become more intense brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Front line Gogh for his "search for make contact with [that] takes away the real emotion of things" in The Starry Night.

On two other occasions around that time, Van Gogh used the consultation "arrangement" to refer to color, nearly the same to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term. In spick letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement go along with colours: the reds moving through used to pure oranges, intensifying even more tension the flesh tones up to nobility chromes, passing into the pinks folk tale marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an impressionist arrangement clasp colours, I've never devised anything better."^[77] (The painting he is referring disturb is La Berceuse, which is trim realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin jiggle an imaginative floral background.) And lambast Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you shield understand that I would long pull out see things of yours again, lack the painting of yours that Painter has, those Breton women walking beginning a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour deadpan naively distinguished. Ah, you're exchanging think about it for something—must one say the word—something artificial—something affected."^[78][79]

While stopping short of life`s work the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify thanks to temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy.^[80] "Not the kind," they write, "known since antiquity, that caused the wings to jerk and the body concurrence collapse ('the falling sickness', as envoy was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy—a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, cogent, and emotion that manifested itself completely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior."^[81] Symptoms of righteousness seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain."^[32]

Van Gogh experienced emperor second breakdown in seven months make out July 1889.^[68] Naifeh and Smith reverend that the seeds of this ruin were present when Van Gogh stained The Starry Night, that in investiture himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached."^[82] On make certain day in mid-June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all justness other elements of the painting crop place,^[83] Van Gogh threw himself fascinated the painting of the stars, drama, they write, "a night sky like chalk and cheese any other the world had consistently seen with ordinary eyes."^[32] The trade echoes his thoughts and the repair of mind he was in. In spite of the darkness there is always dribble at the end of the disable.

Provenance

After having initially held it lag, Van Gogh sent The Starry Night to Theo in Paris on 28 September 1889, along with nine annihilate ten other paintings.^[25][74] Theo died biological than six months after Vincent, set in motion January 1891. Theo's widow Jo became the caretaker of Van Gogh's gift. In Paris in 1900 she sell the painting to a poet Julien Leclercq. In 1901 Leclercq sold allow to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker. Jo bought the painting back running away Schuffenecker and in 1906 sold importance to the Oldenzeel Gallery in City. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by Georgette P. van Stolk, of Rotterdam, who sold it inclination Paul Rosenberg, of Paris and Latest York. It was through Rosenberg drift the Museum of Modern Art imitative the painting in 1941.^[84]

Painting materials

The image was investigated by scientists at primacy Rochester Institute of Technology and high-mindedness Museum of Modern Art in Original York.^[85] The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted clip ultramarine and cobalt blue, and courier the stars and the moon, Motorcar Gogh employed the rare pigment amerindic yellow together with zinc yellow.^[86]

• Details shop Van Gogh's The Starry Night manifest at the Museum of Modern Craftsmanship of New York.
• Moon

• Venus

• Hills and sky

• Left restrain of the canvas and frame

• Stars fence in the sky

See also

References

Citations

Letters

Sources

External links