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The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, painted in June 1889.
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The Starry Night, a moderately abstract landscape painting (1889) of an expressive night sky over a small hillside village, one of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s most celebrated works.
The oil-on-canvas painting is dominated by a night sky roiling with chromatic blue swirls, a glowing yellow crescent moon, and stars rendered as radiating orbs. One or two cypress trees, often described as flame-like, tower over the foreground to the left, their dark branches curling and swaying to the movement of the sky that they partly obscure. Amid all this animation, a structured village sits in the distance on the lower right of the canvas. Straight controlled lines make up the small cottages and the slender steeple of a church, which rises as a beacon against rolling blue hills. The glowing yellow squares of the houses suggest the welcoming lights of peaceful homes, creating a calm corner amid the painting’s turbulence.
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Van Gogh painted The Starry Night during his 12-month stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, several months after suffering a breakdown in which he severed a part of his own ear with a razor. While at the asylum, he painted during bursts of productivity that alternated with moods of despair. As an artist who preferred working from observation, van Gogh was limited to the subjects that surrounded him—his own likeness, views outside his studio window, and the surrounding countryside that he could visit with a chaperone.
Although van Gogh’s subjects were restricted, his style was not. He experimented with the depiction of various weather conditions and changing light, often painting the wheat fields nearby under a bright summer sun or dark storm clouds. Van Gogh was also particularly preoccupied by the challenges of painting a night landscape and wrote about it not only to his brother, Theo, but to a fellow painter, Émile Bernard, and to his sister, Willemien. In a letter addressed to the latter, he alleged that night was more colourful than day and that stars were more than simple white dots on black, instead appearing yellow, pink, or green. By the time van Gogh arrived at Saint-Rémy, he had already painted a few night scenes, including Starry Night (Rhône) (1888). In that work, stars appear in bursts of yellow against a blue-black sky and compete with both the glowing gas lamps below and their reflection in the Rhône River.
The painting was one of van Gogh’s late works, as he committed suicide the following year. His artistic career was brief, comprising only 10 years, but it was very productive. He left more than 800 paintings and 700 to 850 drawings to his brother. When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City purchased The Starry Night from a private collector in 1941, it was not well known, but it has since become one of van Gogh’s most famous, if not one of the most recognized, works in the art history canon.
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Oct 21, 2021 · His art depicts bright and colorful landscapes and objects with expressive and dynamic brushstrokes. Below we will explore how van Gogh brought his inner dimensions to life on his canvases, namely the painting The Starry Night (1889).
- Alicia du Plessis
- Vincent van Gogh
- ( Author And Art History Expert )
- 1889
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The Starry Night was painted by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in 1889 during his stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Van Gogh observed the night sky from his barred bedroom window and became preoccupied by the challenges of painting a nighttime landscape.
Feb 9, 2024 · This masterpiece, created in 1889, encapsulates the essence of Van Gogh's unique artistic style and emotional depth. On a surface level, The Starry Night depicts a tranquil night scene with a small town illuminated by a dazzling night sky.
Title: The Starry Night. Artist: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise) Date: June 1889. Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 29 × 36 1/4 in. (73.7 × 92.1 cm) Classification: Paintings. Credit Line: The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Van Gogh´s passion for nighttime is evident in the Starry Night painting, where the powerful sky sits above the quiet town. It seems that van Gogh is contrasting life and death with luminous stars and a gloomy, peaceful village. The main light sources are the bright stars and crescent moon.
