Meanwhile, other parts, such as the steeple on the church, are imagined. While van Gogh painted the same view several times with each interpretation appearing different than the last, it is this celestial-inspired image that has captivated viewers for nearly a century.
Upon its completion, van Gogh actually believed the painting to be a failure. He wrote to Theo, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me.
Created only a year before his death, The Starry Night is one of the paintings Jo van Gogh-Bonger inherited from her husband. The painting was then sold to Georgette P. Peggy Carouthers is a writer, editor, and custom content manager based in California.
She enjoys creative writing and learning about art and literature. She is passionate about connecting companies with audiences. Subscribe to our free e-letter! Your Email Address. Helena St. Lucia St. When he looked at the night sky, he wrote to Theo in August , he saw "the mysterious brightness of a pale star in the infinite.
And all the same to feel the stars and the infinite high and clear above you. Then life is almost enchanted after all. Van Gogh saw the night as a period of reflection and meditation after a day of activity, says MoMA curatorial assistant Jennifer Field, one of the organizers of the exhibition. And he linked this with the changing of the seasons. In Arles, in and , van Gogh's paintings took on a mystical, dreamlike quality.
Straight lines became wavy, colors intensified, thick paint became thicker, sometimes squeezed straight onto the canvas from the tube. Some of these changes were later taken as a sign of his madness, and even van Gogh feared that "some of my pictures certainly show traces of having been painted by a sick man.
In a letter to Wil, he explained that "the bizarre lines, purposely selected and multiplied, meandering all through the picture, may fail to give the garden a vulgar resemblance, but may present it to our minds as seen in a dream, depicting its character, and at the same time stranger than it is in reality. The artist's focus on the relationship between dreams and reality—and life and death—had a profound meaning for him, as he had confided to Theo in a letter a year before his first crisis in Arles.
Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.
It was during the night hours that his experiments with imagination and memory went the farthest. Van Gogh considered it one of the ugliest paintings he'd made, but also one of the most "real. He wrote Wil that he had painted it "at night under a gas jet.
And yet, once again I let myself go reaching for stars that are too big—a new failure—and I have had enough of it. Theo liked the painting but was worried. Thus, in addition to descriptions evident in the myriad of letters he wrote to his brother, Theo, it offers a rare nighttime glimpse into what the artist saw while in isolation. One has the impression that the artist has expelled his inner conflict onto a canvas. Everything here is brewed in a huge cosmic fusion.
The sole exception is the village in the foreground with its architectural elements. Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France?
Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. The artist is looking down on a village from an imaginary viewpoint. It is framed by his newly-discovered motifs: at left a cypress towers skywards, at right a group of olive trees cluster into the cloud, and against the horizon run the undulating waves of the Alpilles. Van Gogh's treatment of his motifs prompts associations with fire, mist and the sea,and the elemental power of the natural scene combines with the intangible cosmic drama of the stars.
The eternal natural universe cradles the human settlement idyllically, yet also surrounds it menacingly. The village itself might be anywhere, Saint-Remy or Nuenen recalled in a nocturnal mood. The church spire seems to be stretching up into the elements, at once an antenna and a lightning conductor, like some kind of provincial Eiffel Tower the fascination of which was never far from van Gogh's nocturnes.
Van Gogh's mountains and trees particularly the cypresses had hardly been discovered but they seemed to crackle with an electric charge. Confident that he had grasped their natural appearance, van Gogh set out to remake their image in the service of the symbolic. Together with the firmament, these landscape features are singing the praises of Creation in this painting. He returned to incorporating the darker colors from the beginning of his career and Starry Night is a wonderful example of that shift.
Blue dominates the painting, blending hills into the sky. The little village lays at the base in the painting in browns, greys, and blues. Even though each building is clearly outlined in black, the yellow and white of the stars and the moon stand out against the sky, drawing the eyes to the sky. They are the big attention grabber of the painting. Shop Our Christmas Cards. Notice the brush strokes. For the sky they swirl, each dab of color rolling with the clouds around the stars and moon.
On the cypress tree they bend with the curve of the branches.
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