Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Museum of Modern Art, New York replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh · 1889
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 73.7 × 92.1 cm
- Held by
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Sunflowers
The National Gallery, London
What to look at
Painted from the window of his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, in daylight, from memory and from what he could see at night from a barred east-facing window. Almost nothing in it is reportage. The village below is Dutch, not Provençal — the church spire belongs to the north, not to Saint-Rémy. The cypress in the foreground is far too large for its position and functions as a vertical that stitches the ground to the sky. What is observed is the sky itself: the moon is in the right phase and in roughly the right place for that time of year, and Venus was a conspicuous morning object in the spring of 1889. The rolling band across the middle of the sky is where people get stuck. It is not a cloud and it is not a galaxy; it is a passage of paint moving at a different speed from everything around it, and the picture needs it to stop the eleven star-whorls from simply sitting in a row.