Starry Night

The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh

The Starry Night (1889) is one of the most celebrated oil canvases by Vincent van Gogh. He created it during his one-year stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, after his ear incident.

The artist apprehended the issues of painting a nighttime landscape, which he expressed in his letters to his brother and sister, and wanted to experience that challenge. He considered night more vivid than it seemed.

The canvas depicts a starry night before the sunrise, which the artist watched through the iron-barred window of his room on the second floor above his studio, with the creative addition of an imaginary and idealized village. Later, it was proved that in this work as well as in Café Terrace at Night, Vincent van Gogh accurately placed the Big Bear constellation in the sky.

The artist looks out over a village from an imaginary location. It is framed by the motifs, the availability of which is the latest achievement. On the left, a cypress tree blazes up to the sky, on the right, the mixture of deciduous trees is grouped together like clouds, and the backdrop of the Alpilles is wavy against the horizon.

The way van Gogh designs them, the motifs evoke associations with fire, fog, and the sea. The elemental force of the natural structures is transferred to the cosmic intangibility of the stars. The primeval forces embed the settlement between themselves in an idyllic and threatening manner.
It is a collection of human dwellings, it is just as Saint-Rémy as nine, which Vincent Van Gogh memorizes in the darkness of a night scene.

The determinedly raised top of a church tower comes into contact with the surrounding forces of nature. It is an antenna and lightning rod in one as if it were the Eiffel Tower, the fascination of which is always present in Van Gogh’s night pictures. Hardly integrated into one’s own fund, mountains, trees, and, above all, the cypress crackle with meaningful electricity.
Van Gogh was then looking for the symbol in them on the way to the disfigurement.

“I still have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of the starry sky,” he describes this painting in a letter.

Also, Albert Boime, an American art historian using modern planetarium’s recreation of how the sky would look on June 19 of 1889, declared that the morning star in the painting is Venus. Unlike most of his works, van Gogh painted this one from memory and imagination during the day in his studio just a few months before his suicide.

There is an assumption that stars in the painting appear to flicker, which can be explained by the way the human brain functions. The value of the painting is estimated at over $100 million. Its home is the Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), which purchased the painting from a private collector in 1941.

Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, he was considered as a madman and to be crazy. He only got famous after he committed suicide in 1890 by shooting himself in the head. Vincent van Gogh gained popularity in the early 20th century with his Starry Night Painting to be among his most famous and popular artworks.