The Starry Night

History

Van Gogh painted it in June 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had admitted himself that May. It shows the view east from his bedroom window just before sunrise, with the morning star, a cypress and a village he made up. He painted it by day in a ground floor room he used as a studio, laying the sky on in short, thick strokes that still stand up from the canvas. He was unsure of it, and in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard he called it a failure. The Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1941.