Arts: Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

(Estimated reading time: 2 minutes and 53 seconds) 

It has been the subject of poetry, fiction, and song. Easily recognizable because of its unique style, Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night (Cypres and Village) is said to be his most famous painting. While little is known about Van Gogh's emotion towards this particular artwork, its popularity continues to move many with awe and admiration for its timeless and universal beauty.

THE BASICS

Starry Night is painted as oil on canvas, with dimensions of  29 inches (73.7 cm) in height and 36 1/4 inches (92.1 cm) in length. Van Gogh (1853–1890) painted Starry Night on the evening of June 19, 1889, while he was at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy in Provence, France. Van Gogh spent twelve months in the asylum, seeking to have a respite from the mental illness he was suffering with. The famous artwork is now housed in The Museum of Modern Arts in New York City as part of its permanent installation.

THE SUBJECT AND ITS DEPICTION

The artwork is a deviation from Van Gogh's usual subjects, his usual inclination being flowers and wheatfields. Starry Night's subject is said to be a Provencal village landscape beneath a star-filled evening sky. Dominating the painting is the vast expanse of the sky with swirling clouds, stars, and a moon. A small village served as the base, overshadowed by a church with its tall steeple resembling the church in his native homeland, the Netherlands. The village is set in the background of rolling blue hills. To the left and serving as the foreground, an outline of a fiery cypress seemed to be reaching the sky.

As the prominent part of the painting, the depiction of the sky is the striking imagery that can evoke emotions and sentiments in its viewers. At the right is the bright moon while the other luminary at the center-left is understood to be the planet Venus, the morning star that Van Gogh described in one of his letters to his brother, Theo. There are eleven (11) night luminaries in the painting. While the painting's setting is clearly at night, the emotionally beleaguered artist created it in several sessions in the daytime and is based greatly on his memories of different places and vivid imagination. The village is not based on the vista seen from his window and the cypress is appearing closer than it should actually be. The contrast is also obvious: while the night sky is roiling with the energy and brightness of the luminaries, the village lies dark, idyllic, and quiet below. The cypress, looking like a spiraling fire, is viewed to be linking the village with the sky. 

THE STYLE

The style employed by Van Gogh is of his own development, known as Post-Impressionism, which is a movement in the history of art that focuses on the expressions of emotional and psychological responses to the world using bold colors and expressive and often symbolic images. The sky is illustrated with turbulence and agitation with intense swirling patterns rolling like waves. The bright round night luminaries are concentric circles of radiant white and yellow. The short and thick-layered brushstrokes make for a sweeping and moving illustration of the artist's lurid imagination, memory, and emotions.

"Looking at the stars always makes me dream... 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." 

 Sources. MoMA, VanGoghGallery

Arts: Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh by Leandro Angelo Castro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.