The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh, 1889 · Gallery 501 · Floor 5

Alright, so find the big white star. Left of the middle, just to the right of that dark tree. The one with all that light around it. That’s the one he wrote his brother Theo about. You know this guy. Vincent van Gogh. More than two thousand paintings and drawings in about ten years. Sells hardly any of them. When he paints this, he’s a patient in an asylum in the south of France. Checked himself in. Iron bars on his bedroom window. One morning, way before sunrise, he looks out, and there’s this light. He writes to Theo about “the morning star, which looked very big.” That’s actually Venus. The planet. So what has he actually seen out there? Basically just the garden, and whatever’s past the bars. That town? He couldn’t see it from his window. He put it there. He’s wanted to paint a starry sky for a while. A year before, in Arles, he’s writing to a painter friend, wondering when he’ll finally get to it. Says it’s always on his mind. He tells Theo the stars are like the black dots on a map. Towns. Why should the lights up there be any harder to get to? You take the train to the next town over. You take death to go to a star. Anyway, he paints it in a spare room. A night sky, painted during the day. Short strokes, one after another, looping around that big swirl. Around every star, rings of white and yellow, pushed out and out. So go back to that white light. The one that looked very big. That November, he writes the same painter friend. Says he’s made the stars too big again. “Another failure.”

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