The Starry Night: What Van Gogh Painted and Why

The short version of the Starry Night meaning: Van Gogh painted a sky he had watched from his asylum window in Saint-Rémy, then rebuilt it in the studio, adding a village he could not see and pulling a cypress much closer than it stood. It is a picture of looking, remembering and inventing at once. His letters show he had wanted to paint a starry sky for more than a year, and they show something else nobody expects: within months he called it a failure.

What is actually on the canvas

Start with the facts the Museum of Modern Art gives as its record. The Starry Night is oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4 inches (73.7 x 92.1 cm), dated Saint-Rémy, June 1889. Its credit line reads Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), and its object number is 472.1941. That size matters. This is a mid-sized easel painting, smaller than most people picture after a lifetime of posters.

Now the picture itself, from top to bottom. The sky fills about three-quarters of the canvas, by MoMA’s description. It is pocked with bright orbs, each wrapped in concentric rings of white and yellow light. The crescent moon sits at the far right, and the bright orb left of centre is Venus, the morning star. Through the middle runs a great horizontal swirl, like a wave rolling across the sky.

Below the sky, blue-black hills undulate across the width of the picture. Under them sits a hushed village of humble houses gathered round a church whose steeple rises sharply above the hills. On the left, in front of everything, a dark cypress climbs in flame-like tongues almost to the top edge. It is the only thing in the picture that connects the ground to the sky.

Observation and invention

MoMA’s own description of the painting is unusually frank about how much of it was made up. The view was inspired by his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, where he spent twelve months in 1889-90. But the picture was created in several sessions during the day, not at night. The village was based on other views and could not be seen from his window. The cypress appears much closer than it was.

The museum adds two further details worth knowing. The steeple, it says, resembles those of his native Holland rather than the churches of Provence. And the whirling forms in the sky match published astronomical observations of nebulae, clouds of dust and gas. So the painting mixes three kinds of source: what he saw from the window, what he remembered from the north, and what he had read or seen in print.

That mix is the honest answer to the question of meaning. The Starry Night is not a record of one night. It is a composite, assembled the way a writer assembles a scene from several summers. If you want a method for this kind of looking, the order of attention in how to look at a painting works especially well here: subject, then edges, then where the paint is thickest.

He had wanted this picture for a year

The letters show the idea arriving long before the painting. In April 1888, in Arles, Van Gogh wrote to his friend the painter Émile Bernard about working from imagination. In Anthony Ludovici’s 1913 English translation, the passage reads:

Imagination is surely a faculty that one should develop; for it alone enables us to create a more inspiring and comforting world than we can apprehend by means of a fleeting glance at reality, which is for ever changing and which vanishes like a flash of lightning. How glad I should be one day to try to paint the starry heavens as also a meadow studded with dandelions in the sunlight.

Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard, Arles, c. 12 April 1888, in The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

The Van Gogh Museum’s edition dates this letter to on or about 12 April 1888 (letter 596). Notice the pairing. The starry sky is not yet a spiritual subject. It sits beside a meadow of dandelions, as one more thing that cannot be painted by simply looking.

Three days earlier he had written to his brother Theo with a more specific plan:

I must also paint a starry night, with cypresses, or, perhaps, over a field of ripe corn. We get wonderful nights here.

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 9 April 1888, in The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

The Van Gogh Museum dates that one to Monday, 9 April 1888 (letter 594). A starry night with cypresses, fourteen months before he painted one. In another letter to Bernard, written while he was working on his Sower, the wish turns into a complaint:

But when shall I paint the starry heavens?—that picture which is always in my mind?

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Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard, in The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

The other starry night

He did paint a starry sky at Arles, and it is a different picture. On or about 29 September 1888 he sent Theo a little sketch of a square no. 30 canvas: the starry sky at last, he wrote, actually painted at night under a gas-lamp (letter 691). The edition’s notes identify it as Starry Night over the Rhône.

That makes the comparison useful. The Arles picture was painted on the spot, after dark, with a town’s gaslight reflected in the river. The Saint-Rémy picture, by MoMA’s account, was made by daylight from memory and invention. The second, famous one is the less observed of the two.

What the Saint-Rémy letters say

In a letter to Theo written between about 31 May and 6 June 1889, Van Gogh described seeing the countryside from his window long before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big (letter 777). The edition’s note identifies the morning star as the planet Venus. This is the sentence MoMA itself uses to introduce the painting.

Then, on or about 18 June 1889, he told Theo that he had at last a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky (letter 782). The editors identify that study as Starry Night, F 612. That is close to everything he says about it at the moment of making it. One phrase, and the word is study, not masterpiece.

The Starry Night meaning: what the letters do not say

Here is where popular explanations go wrong. The letters do not say the swirls are his illness made visible. They do not explain the cypress as a symbol of death. MoMA does offer that reading, noting that cypresses were trees of graveyards and mourning, but it offers that as one way to see the tree, not as something Van Gogh wrote.

The letters also do not show him proud of it. In November 1889, writing to Bernard from Saint-Rémy, he looked back on experiments with abstraction. Ludovici’s translation reads:

When Gauguin was at Arles I allowed myself, as you know, to be led into working from imagination, and I painted a woman in black reading a novel. At that time I thought that working from imagination was very delightful. But, my dear friend, it is an enchanted land, and suddenly one finds oneself confronted with an insurmountable wall.

Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard, Saint-Rémy, c. 26 November 1889, in The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

A few lines later Ludovici has him write: And yet, in spite of it all, I let myself go again, but it only resulted in another failure, and I have had enough of it. The translation hides something. In the Van Gogh Museum’s modern English version of the same letter, he admits that he has once again let himself paint stars that are too big, and calls the result a new setback (letter 822).

Ludovici’s version quietly drops the stars. The editors’ note says Van Gogh seems to be referring to Starry Night, made that June. They add that he was not so negative about it in earlier letters, and had even defended it to Theo. So the most famous painting of the night sky was, in at least one letter, his example of going too far.

Starry Night at a glance

Stars as a destination

What the letters do give us is a way of thinking about stars that the painting makes visible. In a letter to Bernard, Ludovici’s volume has him imagining a future life for artists:

The scene of this existence for the painter-butterfly could be one of the innumerable stars which, when we are dead, might perhaps be as accessible to us as are the black spots that in this terrestrial life represent the cities and towns on our maps.

Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard, in The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

Stars as towns on a map: that is the closest he comes to explaining why the sky in The Starry Night is so crowded, so busy and so near. It is a place you might travel to, not a backdrop. For how his colour and brushwork differ from Monet’s, see Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism. For another picture whose famous subject hides a more interesting structure, try the Great Wave. Poets have answered this canvas too, in ekphrasis.

One last detail, from the notes to letter 777. The editors cite the astronomer Charles A. Whitney: Venus had emerged in the morning twilight in mid-May 1889 and grew more prominent and higher in the morning sky through June. The bright point left of centre was rising higher every morning, in exactly the weeks he was painting it.

Sources

• The Museum of Modern Art, Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 472.1941: moma.org
• Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, Project Gutenberg #40393: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40393
• Van Gogh Museum, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, letter 594 (to Theo, 9 April 1888): vangoghletters.org
• Letter 596 (to Bernard, c. 12 April 1888): vangoghletters.org
• Letter 691 (to Theo, c. 29 September 1888): vangoghletters.org
• Letter 777 (to Theo, c. 31 May-6 June 1889): vangoghletters.org
• Letter 782 (to Theo, c. 18 June 1889): vangoghletters.org
• Letter 822 (to Bernard, c. 26 November 1889): vangoghletters.org