The Starry Night is Vincent van Gogh's swirling night sky over a quiet village, painted in June 1889 at the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. What it means is left to the viewer: in the letters that mention it, Van Gogh calls it a study.
Critics have since read the cypress as a sign of death and the eleven stars as an echo of the Bible. Those are readings made by viewers, and the painter's own letters say little about the picture's meaning.
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A study is a fitting word, and a stranger one than it sounds. In September 1888, in Arles, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that he had a tremendous need for religion, and that this was why he went outside at night to paint the stars. Less than a year later he painted his most famous night sky.
He did it indoors. Over several sessions in mid-June 1889, in a room the asylum let him use as a studio, he painted in full daylight a night he had watched from his bedroom window.
A night rebuilt by day, with a village under it that was never there: that is the picture people read symbols into.
Why did Van Gogh call it a study?
Days after finishing it, on about 18 June 1889, he wrote to Theo: "At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky." He added that the two studies were "comparable in sentiment." Nothing in the sentence announces a masterpiece.
The word stuck. On about 20 September he listed the canvas as a "Night study." In the same letter he said the first four canvases on his list "are studies that don't have the effect of an ensemble like the others," and that the only things he considered "a little good" were the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees, the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry.
The Night study was not among them. The editors of his letters note that he waited before sending it, and it left for Paris in late September with several other paintings.
It did not have its famous name yet either. The Art Newspaper reports that the picture was first called Starry Night at an exhibition in Rotterdam in 1927, decades after his death.
What You'll Discover
The village that was never there.
What he told another painter.