Van Gogh's "Starry Night" Up Close

"Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star."

The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh ca. 1889. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Somewhere between reality and dreams lies The Starry Night.

My eyes are first drawn to the center of the composition, where a swirling galaxy teems with the warm light of the stars. Merely a few colors are needed to bring the night to life: shades of blue, violet, yellow, and white. Thick brushstrokes appear in a dash-like pattern, giving the sky unbridled energy, contrasted by the peaceful scene below.

The waning moon, as well as each star, are encircled by their own pulsating halos of light, bringing to mind ripples in a pond, or raked gravel in a Zen garden.

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889, while he was living in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The asylum was housed in the former Monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole, about two miles from the village (which also happened to be the birthplace of Nostradamus). Surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, and wheat fields, the tranquil countryside somewhat made up for the plainness of the hospital wings that had been recently added to the building. Van Gogh painted many masterpieces during his time in Saint-Rémy, including his Irises (1889), but his most famous work remains The Starry Night.

Interrupting the flow of the sky on the left side of the composition is a cluster of cypress trees, a species emblematic of the South of France. Van Gogh painted a daytime scene (Wheat Field with Cypresses, below) that echoes his Starry Night, though in a nighttime silhouette, the trees resemble flames. The shadowed foreground, coupled with his use of impasto, only makes the starry sky appear more intense.

Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh ca. 1889. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Many of Van Gogh’s later works make use of bold, complimentary colors. As he wrote to his brother, Theo, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily in order to express myself forcefully.”¹

This passion for vivid colors developed after he moved to Paris in 1886 and gained early exposure to Impressionist art. Like many people at the time, he was initially turned off by the brightness of their colors, amplified by recent advancements in synthetic pigments. However, he soon changed his mind, finding the advantages in new techniques that moved beyond realistic depictions of the world.

Even Impressionism wouldn’t satisfy him for long. After relocating to Arles two years later, he wrote about the influence of Romantic artists like Eugène Delacroix on his recent work:

What I learned in Paris is leaving me and I am returning to the ideas I had … before I knew the impressionists. And I should not be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, for it has been fertilized by the ideas of Delacroix rather than by theirs. Because, instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly.²

Vincent van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist—a term that wouldn’t be coined for several decades. Post-Impressionism, which includes artists like Paul Gaugin and the later works of Paul Cézanne, moved beyond capturing “impressions” of a scene by incorporating elements from the artist’s imagination or inner-mind. This “extrasensory” expression could include colors or shapes that aren’t true to nature, or in the case of Starry Night, elements of the composition that are purely imagined.

When we examine the foreground of Starry Night, the village is outlined, a detail that can be found in many of Van Gogh’s paintings. He derived this technique from Japanese woodblock prints, which had flooded the European market and were especially beloved by French artists of the period. (In fact, Van Gogh’s swirling sky contains echoes of Hokusai’s The Great Wave.) However, the village scene is further indicative of the Post-Impressionist imagination. If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s not French.

Van Gogh worked as a pastor in his earlier years, though he eventually grew disenchanted with formal religious institutions in favor of a more personal relationship with God and nature. The tall church spire in Starry Night is inspired by the Protestant churches in the artist’s native Holland. Nestled in a Provençal landscape, this little Dutch village under a heavenly sky is a collision of Van Gogh’s past and present. It is, to me, a profoundly spiritual scene. “Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen,” he wrote the year before, “we take death to reach a star.”³

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Theo van Gogh was devoted to his ailing brother, and he championed Vincent’s artistic career before and after his death. While Vincent was in Saint-Rémy, Theo continued promoting his brother’s paintings and placing them in exhibitions. (Note that Vincent had moved to Paris in 1886 and died in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890—really only a few years into his professional career, and just as he was beginning to make traction with exhibitions.)

Irises, Vincent van Gogh ca. 1889. Via the Getty Museum.

Theo was thrilled with Irises, but he was mystified by The Starry Night. He wrote to Vincent, “I find that the search for style takes away from the real feeling for things.” Vincent replied:

In spite of what you say, that the search for style frequently does harm to other qualities, the fact remains that I feel strongly driven to search for style… I am inclined to believe that as time passes by, you will get used to it.⁴

Starry Night is such a ubiquitous image in art and merchandise that we sometimes forget how bold this would have been to a 19th-century viewer, who would indeed need time to “get used to it.”

I have had the opportunity to see the painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Despite viewing this work from the jaded 21st century, it is enormously impactful in person, with its wave of energy surging across the canvas. Starry Night is a reminder of the sublime beauty of nature in conversation with the human spirit: that which we observe, and that which we can only imagine.

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Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:

What Color Are Van Gogh's Irises?

The End of Impressionism

1. H. H. Arnason and Elizabeth C. Mansfield, History of Modern Art, Sixth Edition (Pearson, 2010), 73.

2. John Rewald, The History of Impressionism: Fourth, Revised Edition (Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 549.

3. “The Starry Night” in Art: The Definitive Visual History, ed. Andrew Graham Dixon (DK, 2018), 378.

4. John Rewald, Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gaugin (Literary Licensing LLC, 2012), 348.