Post-Impressionism · 1889
The Starry Night
A quiet village sits beneath a sky that refuses to stay still. Van Gogh turned a view from Saint-Rémy into one of art's great night scenes.
- Made
- 1889
- Style
- Post-Impressionism
- Collection
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
From museum to game table
The in-game crop
The card adds paint spaces, rewards and a frame. This crop shows the artwork area used during play, without the card rails.
The short history
What happened here?
Van Gogh painted this canvas while living at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy. The view began with the landscape outside his window. The village and its tall church came from memory and invention.
The painting joined observation with a highly arranged sky. Thick strokes bend around stars, moon and cypress. Van Gogh later called the work an exaggeration, but its force comes from that deliberate push beyond a literal view.
The work passed through the collections of Theo van Gogh and Jo van Gogh-Bonger. MoMA acquired it in 1941. It soon became the museum's best-known painting and a lasting symbol of van Gogh's final years.
Look closer
Three details worth finding
- 1The cypress that links the ground and sky
- 2Concentric halos around each star
- 3The calm village beneath the moving heavens
Sources
Read further
Museum records come first. Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons provide useful public background and image records.