In 1900, Jo sold the painting to French art critic and painter Julien Leclerq, who in turn sold it to French artist Claude-Émile Schuffenecker. In 1906, Jo bought back the painting from him and sold it to the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam, and was then owned by a certain Georgette van Stolk until 1938. Van Stolk then sold the painting to French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who then sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the year 1941.
15 Real Locations That Inspired Iconic Paintings
On June 5, 1890, Vincent van Gogh sat to write a letter to his younger sister, Wilhelmina. The Dutch artist was less than two months from a gunshot to the abdomen that would tragically end his life. But at the time he sat to write his sister, Vincent’s focus was squarely on the sites he intended to paint within the French town he’d recently moved into—and where, ultimately, he would be buried. “With that I have a larger painting of the village church—an effect in which the building appears purplish against a sky of a deep and simple blue of pure cobalt, the stained glass windows look like ultramarine blue patches, the roof is violet and in part orange. In the foreground a little flowery greenery and some sunny pink sand.” The church Van Gogh describes transformed into his masterpiece, The Church at Auvers (1890). Hordes of visitors travel to Paris’s Musée d’Orsay each day to see the iconic painting. Yet what many of those visitors may not realize is that were they to take a train one hour north of Paris to the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, they could see the very church itself.
It’s not always so simple to pinpoint the location of famous paintings. Much of that is due to the fact that in the years leading up to Impressionism (1860s), portraiture was more in vogue than landscapes (think Jean-Léon Gérôme, and his painting Bashi-Bazouk). Add to that the fact that landscapes that were painted in the 19th century by such luminaries as Thomas Cole were more of a backdrop to a greater political message (as with Cole’s tour de force The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings depicting the rise and fall of an empire, witnessed through the unattached prism of nature). Ultimately, these well-known creatives were artists, not topographers.
Yet, with the founding of Impressionism, and the advent of the paint tube—an invention courtesy of the American painter John G. Rand—artists were afforded the ability to walk into nature to paint the very scenes we can venture into today. In the span of art history, however, the window of painting lush landscapes en plein air didn’t stay open for very long. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, Cubism broke away from conventions, forcing art toward abstraction, making the actual locations of any painting extremely difficult to discern.
Below, from Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône to Monet’s Water Lilies, AD lists the locations around the world to visit, should you want to see your favorite paintings play out before your eyes.
What is The Starry Night?
In case you know literally nothing about art or have been living under a rock since you were born, you might have this question. Allow me to address it.
The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting made by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, the one and only, Vincent van Gogh, who went on to become one of the greatest and most influential artists in Western art after his death. The Starry Night was painted in June 1889, when Van Gogh was in a lunatic asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Van Gogh had admitted himself into the Saint-Paul Asylum in March of 1889 after having suffered a major nervous breakdown in December of the previous year, which culminated in him cutting off his left ear.
As the asylum was mostly empty at the time, Van Gogh was given a separate room on the ground floor to use as his painting studio. It was in this studio that he would go on to paint The Starry Night, along with some of his most well-known works such as Irises, View of the Asylum and Chapel of Saint-Rémy, and Olive Trees with yellow sky and Sun.
The Starry Night depicts the view from the east-facing window of his room in the asylum just before sunrise. He also included a village in the painting which was not actually a part of the view from his room.
While creating the painting, he wrote to his brother Theo that he had begun a new study of a starry sky.
Is the view depicted in The Starry Night unique to the painting?
As it turns out, Van Gogh had painted several variations of the same view he saw from his bedroom window. It is estimated that he painted around 21 variations of the same view at different times of the day and under different weather conditions.
He painted the view at sunrise, moonrise, rainy days, overcast days, windy days, and sunny days as well. The Starry Night just happens to be one of these variations.
In 15 out of the 21 variations, the cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall bordering the wheat field, while in the remaining 6, which includes The Starry Night, the cypress trees are much closer in view.
One pictorial element uniting all the variations is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains.
What makes The Starry Night unique then?
That’s a good question. The element that makes The Starry Night unique when compared to the other variations is that it is the only nocturne in the series. Nocturne, in art terms, basically means a painting of a night scene.
Scholars also believe that the brightest star in the painting, that is the one to the right of the cypress tree, is actually Venus, which is said to have been visible at dawn in that region in the spring of 1889. This can be further confirmed by a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, in which he describes seeing the big bright morning star before sunrise. Venus is at times known as the morning star.
Another element unique to the painting is the village, which was not visible from his bedroom window. Scholars suggest that the village in the painting is based on a sketch he made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy.
The sky in the painting was painted with cobalt blue and ultramarine, and the stars were painted with zinc yellow and Indian yellow.
