Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 as a study of the sky he watched before sunrise from his bedroom window at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum set in a former monastery at Saint-Rémy, in Provence, in the south of France.
He had checked himself in that May, after the breakdown in Arles in which he mutilated his left ear. The sky and its morning star come from his window. The village below them is an invention.
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His letters show how the picture began. Writing to his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, between May 31 and June 6, 1889, he described the countryside seen from his barred window "a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big."
On the canvas, that hour becomes a sky of ultramarine and cobalt blue, crossed by great swirls in its upper center. The stars and a thin crescent moon are painted in yellows. Below them, the low hills of the Alpilles run in a diagonal from the right.
At the foot of those hills sits a sleeping village with a church steeple. In the foreground rises a cypress, a tall and narrow evergreen of Provence, painted far larger than life. The village was not in view from the asylum. Van Gogh based it on a sketch drawn from a hillside above Saint-Rémy.
The brightest light in the sky
In The Starry Night, the brightest light is the large white one just to the right of the cypress. It is not a star at all, and what it really is fixes the hour of the scene.
What You'll Discover
What the brightest light in the sky really is.
Why a night scene was painted in daylight.
What he told Émile Bernard in November.