Van Gogh thought The Starry Night was a failure.
He painted it in June 1889 from an asylum where he had admitted himself, working from the view out of his barred bedroom window. The brightest 'star' is really Venus. The village is invented. And in a letter to a friend, Van Gogh called the whole thing a failure.
After the breakdown in December 1888 in which he mutilated his ear, Vincent van Gogh voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889. The former monastery was less than half full, so he had a bedroom plus a ground-floor studio. He painted the view from his east-facing bedroom window at least twenty-one times, in different weather and light. The Starry Night, finished by about 18 June, is the only night scene among them.
It mixes observation with invention. Astronomers have confirmed that Venus, the 'morning star', was shining brightly at dawn in Provence that spring, and it is the bright point beside the cypress. But the Moon is stylised rather than astronomically correct, the cypresses are enlarged, and the village with its rather Dutch-looking steeple was not visible from his window at all; it was based on a sketch made elsewhere.
Van Gogh said surprisingly little about it. He called it a 'night study', left it out of one shipment to his brother Theo, and in November 1889 wrote to the painter Émile Bernard that reaching for 'stars that are too big' had been another failure, a lapse into painting from imagination rather than nature. Theo, too, worried that the search for style was taking away 'the real sentiment of things'.
Critics have since read almost everything into those swirls: religious visions, the Book of Revelation, spiral galaxies drawn by astronomers of his day, or simply the mistral wind. Pigment analysis shows a sky of ultramarine and cobalt blue, with stars of Indian yellow and zinc yellow. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the painting in 1941, and rarely lends it.
Source: Wikipedia — The Starry Night · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
