In May 1889 Vincent van Gogh walked into an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and the view from his east-facing window gave him the subject of the most famous night sky in art. But the painting is not a view. He worked in daylight, from memory, and he added a village that was not there.
The sky is real, or close to it. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh described seeing the countryside from his window long before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big. The bright star in the painting is generally taken to be Venus. The village below is an invention, and its church spire looks more like the Dutch churches he remembered from his childhood than anything in Provence. The big dark cypress in the foreground, a tree associated with graveyards, is a deliberate presence, climbing toward the stars like a flame.
The swirls have drawn the attention of scientists. In 2006, physicists studying the brightness patterns in his skies reported that they match the mathematical structure of real turbulence, the way a fluid mixes. Van Gogh knew nothing about fluid dynamics, but he had spent years watching wind and clouds, and his brushwork seems to have caught something real.
Van Gogh was not sure the picture worked. He was making it during one of the hardest periods of his life, between episodes of illness, and he tended to see it as part of an experiment with abstraction rather than a finished masterpiece. It sold to nobody in his lifetime. He died a year later, in July 1890.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 1941, and it has hung there ever since, one of the most requested paintings in the collection.
Van Gogh's The Starry Night appears on our: