Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889, in a room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had admitted himself the previous month. He worked from the view out of his east-facing window, from earlier drawings, and from memory. The village below the hills is not there in real life. He put it in.
It is one of the most reproduced paintings in the world, and a great deal of what circulates about it is wrong. What follows is nine things that are true, with the sources named where a claim is contested rather than settled.
Who Vincent van Gogh was
Van Gogh was born in 1853, the son of a Protestant pastor in the southern Netherlands. The family was respectable and comfortable rather than wealthy, and money was a source of strain for most of his adult life.
He came to painting late. Before he picked it up seriously in 1880, at 27, he had worked for the art dealers Goupil & Cie in The Hague, London and Paris, taught briefly at a school in England, clerked in a bookshop, and served as a lay preacher among mining families in the Borinage in Belgium. He had no formal training worth the name, and the work everyone knows was made in the last ten years of his life.
He died on 29 July 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, two days after shooting himself in the chest. He was 37.
Nine facts about The Starry Night
1. He painted it from an asylum window, but not from life
Van Gogh entered Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in May 1889, following the crisis in Arles the previous December in which he cut off part of his own ear. He had a room with a view east over an enclosed wheat field.
He wrote to his brother Theo about seeing the country from that window before sunrise, with the morning star large above it. But he did not paint at the window. Patients were not permitted to work in their rooms at first, and the finished canvas was made in a studio downstairs, out of sketches and recollection.
2. The village is invented
There is no village in that position at Saint-Rémy, and the church spire is a northern one — steep and narrow in a way Provençal churches are not. It looks Dutch because it is Dutch, carried in from memory. The hills and the cypress are real; the town under them is not.
3. The morning star is Venus
Albert Boime, an art historian at UCLA, reconstructed the night sky over Saint-Rémy as it would have appeared in June 1889 and published the comparison in 1985. The bright body van Gogh called the morning star matches the position of Venus, which was unusually prominent that month. Several of the other stars line up too.
This is the rare piece of Starry Night trivia that is both surprising and well evidenced.
4. Van Gogh was not especially pleased with it
The painting we now treat as his finest he treated as a study. In his letters he refers to it in passing, among other canvases, and he was uneasy about how far he had pushed the exaggeration.
Theo, who saw more of his brother's work than anyone alive, wrote back that he felt the search for style in it came at the expense of the feeling in the picture. That judgment did not age well, but it was an honest one at the time and worth knowing.
You will find the claim online that van Gogh called it "the worst thing he had ever done" or said it made him sick. Those quotations do not appear in his letters. They have been invented somewhere along the way and repeated.
5. There are two Starry Nights, and people confuse them
Van Gogh painted Starry Night Over the Rhône in Arles in September 1888, nearly a year earlier. It is a calmer picture: the town lights of Arles reflected in the river, the Plough overhead, a couple walking at the water's edge. It was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1889.
That is the painting people are usually thinking of when they insist The Starry Night was not the first of its kind. Both are van Gogh's. Neither is by Paul Gauguin, who did not paint a Starry Night at all — a claim that circulates widely and has no basis.
6. He made roughly 2,100 works in ten years
About 860 oil paintings and some 1,200 drawings and watercolors, from 1880 to 1890. That is a finished work every day and a half or so, sustained for a decade, by someone who was frequently ill and frequently broke.
He also painted over earlier canvases to save money, so a number of his pictures have another underneath them.
7. He painted more than thirty self-portraits, mostly for want of a model
Models cost money he did not have, and he had few friends willing to sit. His own face was free and always available. The self-portraits are not vanity, they are practice, and you can watch his handling of paint change across them faster than almost anywhere else in his work.
8. The cypress means two things at once
In the Mediterranean the cypress is a graveyard tree, and most readings of the painting stop there and call the foreground a symbol of death. But it is also an evergreen, and in the picture it is the one thing that connects the ground to the sky, running the full height of the canvas.
Van Gogh's own line about the stars points the same way. He wrote to Theo that looking at the stars always set him dreaming, and asked why the bright dots in the sky should be less reachable than the black dots on a map of France. Just as you take a train to Tarascon or Rouen, he said, you take death to reach a star.
That is not a straightforwardly bleak sentence, and the cypress is not a straightforwardly bleak tree.
9. It has never been sold at auction, and it never will be
The Starry Night went to Theo after Vincent's death, then to Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger when Theo died in January 1891. Johanna is the reason we know van Gogh's name at all: she promoted the work relentlessly and edited the letters for publication.
She sold the painting in 1900 to the poet Julien Leclercq, who passed it to the artist Émile Schuffenecker, and she later bought it back. It moved through several hands before the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 1941, funded through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. It has been there ever since.
Figures like "$100 million" and "$74.98 million" attached to this painting are meaningless. It is in a museum's permanent collection and has never come to market.
What about the one painting he sold?
The story that van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime is close to true but not quite. The documented sale is The Red Vineyard, bought by the Belgian painter and collector Anna Boch for 400 francs at the Les XX exhibition in Brussels in early 1890. It hangs in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
He also traded and sold work in smaller, less-documented ways, and Theo moved pieces through the trade. What is true is that he had no commercial success in his lifetime, and that the market for his paintings arrived after he was gone.
The brushwork, and whether you can learn it
The surface of The Starry Night is thick. Van Gogh loaded paint on heavily and drew with the loaded brush, so the swirls in the sky are actual ridges of pigment catching the light, not a painted illusion of movement. He worked mostly with brushes rather than a palette knife, which is another thing frequently stated the wrong way round.
If you want to understand what he was doing, the useful exercise is not to copy the picture but to build up paint in visible directional strokes and see how differently the surface behaves. Our notes on layering acrylic paint cover the practical side, and the color wheel explains why his blues and yellows sit against each other so loudly. Monet is worth looking at alongside him for contrast — we wrote about the Water Lilies separately.
Ledgebay does not sell a Starry Night kit, and neither does anyone else legitimately reproducing it as a licensed design. Our catalog is original artwork licensed from living painters. If you want something personal on a canvas rather than a famous image, a custom paint by numbers kit made from your own photograph is the closer thing, and you can see finished ones in the customer gallery.
Common questions
When was The Starry Night painted?
June 1889, at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
How big is it?
73.7 by 92.1 cm, or about 29 by 36 inches. Oil on canvas.
Where is The Starry Night now?
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it has hung since 1941.
What is the swirling in the sky?
Van Gogh's own invention rather than an observed effect. Physicists including José Luis Aragón have compared the light and dark structure in it to mathematical models of turbulence, and found a resemblance. It is an interesting finding and a genuinely contested one, so treat it as a comparison rather than an explanation of how he worked.
Did van Gogh cut off his whole ear?
Part of it, in Arles in December 1888. The details of that night are still argued over.
