The Starry Night

The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, made in June 1889 during his voluntary stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence; since 1941 it has been in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Van Gogh admitted himself to the former monastery on 8 May 1889, after the mental breakdown and act of self-mutilation of late December 1888. The clinic catered to wealthy patients and was less than half full, so he was able to use a second-story bedroom as well as a ground-floor studio; he worked continuously through his year-long stay, and Irises and a self-portrait date from the same period.

The picture shows the view from the east-facing window of his room just before sunrise, with an imaginary village added below. Ten swirling stars and a bright yellow crescent moon fill the sky. Venus, which was then visible in the morning sky, appears among the stars, though the moon's position is not astronomically accurate. The cypress in the foreground is exaggerated far beyond its real scale; Van Gogh's letters suggest he valued cypresses for their formal beauty rather than for any symbolic meaning. In the standard catalogue of his works the painting is listed as F612.

The canvas measures 73.7 by 92.1 cm (height by width) and entered the Museum of Modern Art through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest in 1941 (accession 472.1941). It is often described as a touchstone of modern art and is among the most recognizable images in Western painting.