‘The Starry Night’

Vincent Van Gogh was one of the most famous artists of all time. However that was not the case until he died, barely anybody new about him while he was alive.  Born in Zundert, Netherlands in 1853, he lived with his parents who were struggling financially and at the age of fifteen he was forced out of school so he could work and help support his family. His father, Theodorus Van Gogh was a minister and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus was an artist who loved nature, drawing and watercolors. Vincent Van Gogh was famously known for his watercolor and oil paintings. Much of that came from his mother. Vincent’s brother Theo was his best friend, he wrote letters to Theo, they shared their love for art and nature together and Theo also helped Vincent get his art career started. Vincent Van Gogh suffered from a mental illness as well as depression. After cutting his own ear off Van Gogh admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole Asylum in France. It was there that Van Gogh painted ‘The Starry Night’. In a letter he wrote to his brother, he tells him that he was drawing the sketch for the painting from his bedroom while looking out through the steel barred windows. He writes to his brother, “This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big”. It’s interpreted that the morning star that he mentions is the second planet in the solar system, Venus. ‘The Starry Night’ was a combination of what he saw, and his imagination, this was not an exact portrait of what was outside his window at the Asylum. In fact the big structure on the left wasn’t there at all, it’s a church that symbolizes his childhood and home in the Netherlands where he grew up within a very religious family. This is exactly what makes this a modernist piece of artwork, the fact that its not simply a portrait of something he saw and its not simply his imagination, but a hybrid of both those things. In the painting we see it gives off a more nightly feeling, we see the crescent moon in the top corner and a blue sky with hints of dark color. So why did Van Gogh decide to paint while looking out his window during the day, but change the theme of what he saw from day to night? Well Van Gogh was very fond of the night and he was basing some of this drawing off of imagination and memory and he believed that the night was much more alive and  richly colored than the day. This again a total twist on traditional art, some say his creativity and imagination was a product of his mental illness and insanity. A year later after painting ‘The Starry Night’ he shot himself and died two days after.