The Starry Night

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.