The Starry Night became famous late, and far from the room where it was painted. It reached the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, and the museum itself called it "comparatively little known." Van Gogh's legend was already growing. The image was free for anyone to copy, and in 1972 a hit song did the rest.
Van Gogh painted it in June 1889 at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a former monastery at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France, that served as an asylum. He had admitted himself on 8 May, five months after the breakdown in Arles in which he injured his own ear.
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In November 1935 the Museum of Modern Art opened the Van Gogh exhibition that carried him across the United States. It traveled to ten cities, and nearly 900,000 people saw it. The Starry Night was missing from it at first.
The painting was then in a private collection in Holland. According to the museum's own press release, it arrived from Holland too late for the original show and was added only when the exhibition came back to New York for a last two weeks.
Six years after that show, in 1941, the museum made it part of its permanent collection. By then Van Gogh was adored, but this picture was not yet one of his famous ones.
Who owned The Starry Night before New York?
First a widow, then a series of buyers. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger spent years promoting her brother-in-law's work. She sold this canvas in 1900, and it changed hands in Paris a few times before Georgette van Stolk, a collector in Rotterdam, bought it around 1907. Van Stolk kept it for about thirty years.
The Art Newspaper reports that she hung a curtain in front of it in her conservatory on hot summer days. The picture did not yet have the name it carries today. Van Gogh's letters speak of a "starry sky" and a "night study," and Theo called it "the village in the moonlight."
After the painter's death it was often just "The Stars." The title everyone uses first appeared at an exhibition in Rotterdam in 1927, thirty-eight years after he painted it.
Around 1938 van Stolk sold it through a Rotterdam gallery to Paul Rosenberg, a Paris dealer. Rosenberg left France for the United States in 1940, after the German occupation began.
What You'll Discover
What MoMA gave to get it.
What a song did to it.