The Starry Night is an oil painting completed by Vincent van Gogh in June 1889, depicting a swirling night sky over a village, with a prominent crescent moon, bright stars, and a large flame-like cypress tree in the foreground. Van Gogh painted it from memory and imagination rather than direct observation, working from a window of the asylum at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southern France where he was a voluntary patient following a severe breakdown, and the specific balance of observed and invented elements in the composition, including how closely the swirling sky reflects his mental state at the time, has been debated by art historians ever since rather than definitively settled. Van Gogh himself wrote in letters to his brother Theo that he considered the painting a failure relative to his ambitions for it, a judgment strikingly at odds with its later reputation as one of the most famous paintings in the world. Its energetic, thickly applied brushwork, using a technique known as impasto that leaves visible ridges of paint on the canvas, exemplifies the departure from Impressionist technique associated with Van Gogh's mature Post-Impressionist style.
Facts
Year Created LocationMuseum of Modern Art, New York 1 Medium
Medium (category) Connections
Associated With
The Starry Night is painted with thick, visible impasto brushwork.
Created By
Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)
In Form
Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)
In Genre
Entity-backed identity for the genre enum value this work already carries, resolved to an arts art-form by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The genre fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the work unchanged.
In Movement
Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage Learning- chapter on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, section on Van Gogh
Genre reference
The Starry Night is an oil painting completed by Vincent van Gogh in June 1889, depicting a swirling night sky over a village, with a prominent crescent moon, bright stars, and a large flame-like cypress tree in the foreground.
Frequently Asked Questions
What art movement does The Starry Night belong to?
Post-Impressionism.
The Starry Night is classified as Post-Impressionist, painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1889 during his stay at the asylum of Saint-Remy-de-Provence. It is grouped with the movement that followed Impressionism rather than with Impressionism itself.
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