Analysis Of Vincent Van Gogh's Starrry Night

Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (Figure 1), has been subjected to analysis by many scholars. These evaluations have focused on the painting in relation to both van Gogh’s style and biography, with particular focus on the mental illnesses he suffered. The use of these different foci has caught the attention of various theorists who have attempted to interpret both the painting and the artist himself. The particular focus has been on the methodologies of Modernism, Psychoanalysis, and Semiotics. The methods all discuss the painting, Starry Night, in terms of its relation to the viewer and the question of its possible depiction of nature.
Starry Night was painted by Vincent van Gogh who belonged to the Post-Impressionist period. Both van Gogh and Post-Impressionism were concerned with the pursuit of novelty and its importance to artistic development. It has been stated that “His artistic development was self-extending and self-regulating over time, facilitated and driven by an intense, prolonged motivation to find expression in an articulated product”. These ideas are what categorize Post-Impressionism as Avant Garde. Starry Night was painted in June 1889, a month after van Gogh was admitted to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a hospital asylum. His admission to the asylum was at the request of his brother, Theo van Gogh, after various attacks of mental illness. The painting also shows the

In her article, Something of the eternal: A.S. Byatt and Vincent van Gogh, Sue Sorensen mentions that Semiotics in relation to visual images has “a necessary continuum between the realm of speech and writing on the one hand and the visual on the other”. In terms of van Gogh and his relation to Semiotics, she notes that A. S. Byatt, a writer influenced by van Gogh, specified that van Gogh had the ability to not only paint an object but in that painting, explain the object in a verbal