Today, Vincent van Gogh stands as one of the most celebrated artists of the nineteenth century, and his painting, The Starry Night, completed in 1889, is not only one of his most famous works, but also one of the most famous paintings in the world. Yet van Gogh and his beloved painting were not always as famous as they are today.
Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 while he was staying in Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, France, where he lived for a year following a breakdown and the mutilation of his left ear. Painted with oil on canvas, the artist attempted to capture the view from the window in his room.
Though the painter preferred working from observation, he was not allowed to paint in his room, so he began painting the star he had seen in his studio without the view for reference, applying paint to the canvas directly from the tubes to create the image’s iconic thick lines and intense colors.
Created only a year before his death, The Starry Night is one of the paintings Jo van Gogh-Bonger inherited from her husband.
Since the MoMA’s acquisition of the painting, viewers have been transfixed by van Gogh’s interpretation of the nighttime view from his window in Saint-Rémy, and The Starry Night now stands as one of the most famous works of Western art.
REF: www.artandobject.com
PIC: Insider, Encyclopedia Britannica, Far Out Magazine, The New York Times, My Modern Met