Starry Night • Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh’s The Starry Night is a symbolic landscape full of movement, energy, and light. The quietness of the village contrasts with the swirling energy of the sky and the flame-like cypress tree in the foreground. Van Gogh’s impasto technique, or thickly applied colors, creates a rhythmic effect—the picture seems to constantly move in its frame.
“This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother, Theo, describing the inspiration for The Starry Night. But the painting is more about imagination than reality.
While it is true that this landscape is of a real night sky that Van Gogh observed while living in the South of France, the painting contains fictional elements, such as the church spire, which did not exist in the small village he saw from his window; it was transposed from his memory of a similar church in his native Netherlands.