Van Gogh's The Starry Night: Saint-Rémy

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“This morning I saw the countryside 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. This letter was used when he was describing his inspiration for one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night which was created in 1889. The window that he refers to was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he tried to relax away from his emotional suffering while he kept making art.
This Starry night painting was created on a medium sized canvas, being 2′ 5″ x 3′ 0″. This oil painting is dominated by a moon and a star-filled night sky. This part of the artwork takes up three-quarters of the picture and appears turbulent, even distressed, with intense swirling patterns that seem to roll across the surface like waves. It is filled with bright orbs, including the crescent moon to the far right, and Venus, the morning star, to the left of center—surrounded by many circles of bright white and yellow light.
Underneath this sky sits a quiet village of houses around a church, whose steeple rises above the undulating blue-black mountains in the background. A tree sits in the foreground of this night scene. Flame-like, it reaches almost to …show more content…

For example, the church looks like the ones in Holland, where he used to live. The whirling lines in the sky, however, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. It is both balanced and expressive, and the composition is structured by his ordered placement of the tree, steeple, and central nebulae, while his many short brush strokes and paint that is thickly applied set causes its surface to create a rolling motion. This combination of visual contrasts was created by an artist who discovered beauty and interest in the night, which, for him, was “much more alive and richly colored than the

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