UNIT 4
The Starry Night
The Starry Night (Dutch: De sterrennacht) is a painting by Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. The painting depicts the view outside his sanitarium room window at night, although it was painted from memory during the day. Since 1941 it has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Reproduced often, the painting is widely hailed as his magnum opus.
Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night while in the Saint-Rémy asylum in 1889. Vincent's room in the Saint-Rémy asylum looked out on the eastern sky. He painted The Starry Night as a panoramic vista spreading out into an almost infinite distance under a tumultuous sky ablaze with stars.
The writhing branches of the cypress in the foreground are carved, like the stars, in thick impasto, and the tree vibrates with the rhythms of nature's divinity. The orange-yellow crescent moon makes a stark contrast to the vivid blue firmament, recalling Vincent van Gogh's belief that arbitrary color allowed him to express himself "more forcefully."
The center part shows the village of Saint-Rémy under a swirling sky, in a view from the asylum towards north. The Alpilles far to the right fit to this view, but there is little rapport of the actual scene with the intermediary hills which seem to be derived from a different part of the surroundings, south of the asylum. The cypress tree to the left was added into the composition. Of note is the fact van Gogh had already, during his time in Arles, repositioned Ursa Major from the north to the south in his painting Starry Night Over the Rhone..
Van Gogh was perhaps not so happy with this painting. In a letter to Theo from Saint-Rémy he wrote:
“
The first four canvases are studies without the effect of a whole that the others have . . . The olives with white clouds and background of mountains, also the moonrise and the night effect, these are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement, their lines are warped as that of old wood.
”
Later in this letter, Vincent referred once more to the painting:
“
In all this batch I think nothing at all good save the field of wheat, the mountain, the orchard, the olives with the blue hills and the portrait and the entrance to the Quarry, and the rest says nothing to me, because it lacks individual intention and feeling in the lines. Where these lines are close and deliberate it begins to be a picture, even if it is exaggerated.”