The Starry Night

Author

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Its force lies in the expressive brushwork, the vibration of color, and the way the cosmos becomes a mirror of inner life.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night — The Starry Night · Museum of Modern Art, New York

Highlights

Surprising facts & legends

Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.

Interesting facts

The story around the work

Interesting facts & legends

Van Gogh painted this in June 1889 while committed to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy — he had checked himself in voluntarily after cutting off his own ear, and his room on the upper floor faced east toward the Alpilles mountains.
The village in the painting is entirely invented — no such settlement existed outside Van Gogh's window, making the whole composition a conscious blend of observed and imagined reality.
Van Gogh himself was not particularly fond of the painting: in a letter to his brother Theo he called it a "failure" and worried the swirling sky was too far removed from nature.
The canvas spent decades in near-obscurity after Van Gogh's death in 1890; it passed through the hands of his sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger, was sold privately, and only entered MoMA's permanent collection in 1941 via a gift from Lillie P. Bliss.
A 2008 study by NASA scientists found that Van Gogh's sky swirls match the mathematical signature of turbulent fluid flow — the same equations used to describe ocean currents and atmospheric pressure systems — suggesting he captured real physics intuitively.
The tall dark shape on the left is a cypress tree, traditionally a symbol of mourning in Mediterranean cultures and commonly planted in cemeteries — Van Gogh used it repeatedly in his asylum-period work as a bridge between earth and sky.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

Estimated value

What it is worth today

The Starry Night is not for sale — it has been in New York's MoMA since 1941 and has no market price. For comparison, Van Gogh works have fetched tens of millions at auction (his record, Portrait of Dr Gachet, about $82 million in 1990).

More details Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work

Historical context

The Starry Night inside its era

Van Gogh painted the work in Saint-Remy while observing the world from the asylum, turning private experience into a universal image of night.

The Starry Night, is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. The location in Museum of Modern Art, New York matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.

Path to recognition

How the work became widely known

Viewers are held by the powerful union of cosmic scale and human vulnerability: it is both landscape and inner weather.

Value

Why the work matters now

Its force lies in the expressive brushwork, the vibration of color, and the way the cosmos becomes a mirror of inner life.

Connections and legacy

How to read the work more broadly

Vincent van Gogh showed that painting can speak not only about what the artist sees, but about how the artist feels the world. His style makes inner vibration the central artistic material.

Official sources