Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”: Why It’s a Great Painting in 15 Minutes
I had always wanted to see Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” in person and many years ago I got a chance when I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, two dozen other people, who also wanted that chance, were there too, and my vision of Van Gogh’s masterpiece was one behind a phalanx of cell phones all trying to grab a “been there, done that” pic. Fortunately, the video above from the Great Art Explained YouTube channel takes you closer to the painting that an in-person viewing could without setting off an alarm. In 15 minutes, narrator/creator James Payne lays out the history, the creation, and the technique of “Starry Night” in great detail.
Some of the key takeaways from the video include:
1. A re-evaluation of asylums in the 19th century. While certainly many asylums for those with mental illness were despairing places, not so the small one in Saint-Rémy, in Provence. Though there were bars on the windows, Van Gogh’s views were of lush countryside and the small town nearby; views that would soon become the subject of his paintings. And the doctors realized that painting, and the freedom to work on his art, was the best thing for Van Gogh’s mental health. During his one-year stay at the asylum, he finished at least 150 paintings. “The Starry Night,” painted on June 18, 1889, was one of them.
But there were many masterpieces before that, including “Irises,” painted in the asylum’s walled garden before lunch one day; and many of the surrounding countryside once doctors decided he was safe to be let out alone.
2. The formative effect of Impressionism and Japanese ukiyo-e on his work. From Monet and others, Van Gogh took the attention to natural light, the visible brushstrokes, and the pointillist coloring that would form new colors in the viewer’s eye. From the Japanese he took bold, bright colors and radical composition.
We can pinpoint the exact time and date of “Starry Night” and see what Van Gogh saw from his window (thanks to Griffith Park Observatory). And what we learn is…the man was an artist. He collaged the best bits of what he wanted us to see, from constellation and planets, to the village below (taken from a different viewpoint), to the cypress tree, which he brought forward in the composition. Van Gogh was taking a cue from Paul Gauguin, who encouraged him to use his imagination more, and finding the asylum led to a more active and more critical way of thinking about painting.
3. The “unappreciated-in-his-lifetime” myth. Yes, Van Gogh died too young. But no, he wasn’t an obscure artist. As Payne sends us off, he points out that Van Gogh was very much a part of the impressionist art scene, showed his paintings *and* sold them, and even had critics write about him. So, it might be better to call him a rising star, snuffed out too early. We can only wonder where he would have gone in his art, and what he would have created.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
How Hokusai’s Great Wave crashed into Van Gogh’s Starry Night
One of the great masterpieces of 19th-century western art was loosely inspired by one of the greats of 19th-century Japanese art, it has been argued.
Martin Bailey, a specialist on Vincent van Gogh, believes that the Dutch artist drew inspiration from Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa when he painted one of his most dazzling and celebrated works, The Starry Night.
Side by side, the similarities are obvious. In the Hokusai the wave towers over the volcanic peak of Mount Fuji, Bailey said. In the Van Gogh, “the swirling mass in the sky hurtles towards the more gentle slopes of Les Alpilles”.
Art historians know that Van Gogh was a keen collector of Japanese prints. He particularly admired the Hokusai print, which is now one of the most recognisable and reproduced artworks of all time. In one letter to his brother Theo, he said: the “These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.”
Starry Night was painted in the summer of 1889, when Van Gogh was in a small mental asylum on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
He was a voluntary patient, admitted after he cut off his ear and presented it, wrapped in paper, to a young woman in a local brothel.
Van Gogh was well aware that he could not live independently without help. “It must have been horrific moving into a mental asylum in the 19th century,” said Bailey, author of the recent published Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. “I did research on the other patients in the asylum and they were all in a terrible state so it must have been very, very difficult for him to adjust his life. I think it was art which kept him sane and gave him a reason to live.”
He painted Starry Night in June, inspired by the the night sky he looked up at through the bars of his cell and the stunning Provence landscape with wheat fields, cypress trees and olive groves.
Bailey argues that Van Gogh was also inspired, possibly unconsciously, by his memories of The Great Wave. “He didn’t have the print with him but he obviously remembered it in great detail. He had a very strong visual memory.”
The comparison should not be seen as diminishing the brilliance of Starry Night, Bailey said. The painting was “a work of imagination with all sorts of conscious and unconscious elements which must have come in to Vincent’s mind when he was doing the painting”.
But the similarities between the thrust of the wave and the swirling of the sky; that they are both striking studies in blue; and the fact that Van Gogh admired The Great Wave so much all point to a loose inspiration, said Bailey, who blogs about Van Gogh for the Art Newspaper and will discuss his book and theory at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on 5 October.
“It is surprising no one has made this comparison before. I’ve put it to a number of Hokusai and Van Gogh experts and they have all said it is a very interesting theory. It is difficult to prove but my feeling is that it is highly likely.”
Starry Night is regarded as one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces although the artist himself never regarded it that way.
“It is incredible,” said Bailey. “If you go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York [where Starry Night is on display] there are more people with their cameras out in front of it than probably any of the other paintings there.
“I love it and it is fascinating when you think of where it was created, this marvellous and optimistic picture created in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances. Who would imagine someone living in a mental asylum would be able to paint such a marvellous work?”
