The Starry Night 1889

The Starry Night 1889

Starry Night by Van Gogh is one well-known piece of art in the world. Vincent Van Gogh was a famous post-Impressionist artist who painted Starry Night in 1889. The painting Starry Night, an abstract landscape painting (1889) of an expressive night sky over a little slope town.

About the Painting

The painting is done in oil colors on canvas and is dominated by a moon-and star-filled night sky. It looks stormy, even agitated, with extremely whirling patterns that appear to move over its surface like waves. 

Tarnished with splendid circles the painting includes the curved moon to the far right, and Venus, the morning star, to the left of center encompassed by concentric circles of brilliant white and yellow light. Blue dominates the artwork, blending hills into the sky. 

The little town lays at the base in the painting in grays, browns, and blues. Despite the fact that each building is obviously laid out in dark, the yellow and white of the stars and the moon emerge against the sky, attracting the eyes to the sky. 

They are the enormous consideration grabber of the depiction. A cypress tree sits at the closer view of this night scene. Fire like, it achieves nearly to the best edge of the canvas, filling in as a visual connection amongst land and sky.

Starry Night, (1889), Van Gogh

History of the Painting

"This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," van Gogh wrote to his sibling Theo, portraying his motivation for one of his best-known artworks, The Starry Night (1889). 

The window to which he alludes was in the Saint-Paul haven in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he sought respite from his emotional sufferings in which he severed a part of his own ear with a razor, while at the same time proceeding to make art.

Observation and Imagination in The Starry Night 

The Starry Night depicts van Gogh's immediate perceptions and also his creative imagination, memories and feelings. The steeple of the church, for instance, looks like those regular in his local Holland, not in France. 

The spinning frames in the sky, then again, coordinate distributed galactic perceptions of dust storms and gas known as nebulae. The painting is expressive and balanced, the composition is organized by the cypress, steeple, and central nebulae, while his short brushstrokes and thickly applied paint set its surface in movement.