Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas 1889, is a landscape painting of a vast swirl of shining stars over a landscape of distant town and rolling hills, with a single cypress tree rising in the foreground like a dark green flame. Van Gogh painted his starry masterpiece not from life but from memory during the daytime, as this was a view from the sanitorium at Saint-Remy de Provence in which the artist stayed after suffering a breakdown. The swirling vortex of brushstrokes of contrasting colours, uniting the earth landscape with stars and movement in the nocturnal sky, made Starry Night one of Van Gogh’s most popular paintings, which since the 20th century has become an icon of Western art. Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) was a Dutch painter of the Post-Impressionist movement known for bold, expressive drawing, swirling brushstrokes and intense, heightened colours. In early adulthood Van Gogh worked as an art dealer, teacher and pastor before taking up the full time study of drawing and painting in his late twenties. Influenced by Rembrandt, the 19th century Realists and Barbizon school, Van Gogh’s early paintings featured studies of workers and peasants in sombre earth tones. Moving to France in 1886, Van Gogh met with the startling innovations of the Impressionist painters and began to apply their approach to colour and subject matter, which continued into the mature style for which the artist is most renowned. Van Gogh produced many hundreds of drawings and paintings including portraits, landscapes, still life and flower paintings, and numerous self-portraits that became a dominating influence on the modern art of the 20th century and made him one of the most popular artists of all time.