Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

Personal Reflections on a Well-known Painting, Part One.

Vincent Van Gogh painted Starry Night in June 1889. It is oil paint on canvas and measures 29” by 36.25”. It is currently located in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Van Gogh created this painting at a very troubled time in his life; he was a patient in a French insane asylum overlooking the village of Saint Remy. The painting was finished just thirteen months before he committed suicide. His entire life was a miserable one; he committed himself to several mental asylums trying unsuccessfully to find a cure. He sought to find happiness in love but was devastatingly unsuccessful time after time. He studied and trained to be a minister but failed the course and was later dismissed from his position as a lay minister. Van Gogh lived in poverty in Belgium in financial and spiritual despair until he realized that he could teach and influence people through his art. Many people feel that Starry Night is a reflection of this desire. There are eleven stars in the painting, and this may correlate to Genesis 37:9 which states, “And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me.” Van Gogh wanted to share with others his perspective on the God of nature.

Nature figures abundantly in Starry Night. The sky fills two-thirds of the space, and hills, trees, and shrubs figure dominantly in the rest. The man-made structures that Van Gogh could see from his room in the asylum - houses, barns, and a church - are tiny when contrasted to the vastness of nature. The colors are natural too – the vibrant blue of the sky and hills, the fiery gold of moon and stars, the dark grays, greens, and browns of the plants.

To be continued...