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The Starry Night

By Vincent van Gogh

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The Starry Night is one of the most iconic, most immediately recognizable paintings of the modern era. Vincent van Gogh painted this during is stay at the asylum at Saint Remy, after undergoing a period of mental crises and religious hallucinations. Van Gogh was inspired by old woodcut prints while making this painting, and that influence is clearly seen in the swirling sky, full of light and power, that hovers over the dark and sleeping town. The spire of the church rises up to meet this powerful sky. The brushstrokes magnify this separation between the heavenly and the secular: the sky's wild swoops are contrasted by the town's horizontal and vertical short strokes. A cypress tree in the left of the frame provides a dark counterpoint to the spire of the church. The yellow in the town's windows is picked up by the yellow in the stars and the moon. The green in the town's trees is also echoed in the sky above. Astronomers debate about whether or not the sky is technically correct, i.e., could stars truly have a halo and could the moon ever be so bright. Van Gogh would likely scoff at this debate. His art was moving ever more toward the truly abstract, where form and color and line were distorted to express emotion and inner life. The turbulence shown here was likely the artist's own. Vincent van Gogh was ambivalent about the painting, writing to his brother that he thought it was "nothing at all good." However, later generations couldn't disagree more.

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The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh

16" X 20"

$99.00


About the Artist

Vincent Willem van Gogh(30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age of 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Little appreciated during his lifetime, his fame grew in the years after his death. Today, he is widely regarded as one of history's greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, and most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. Although he was little known during his lifetime, his work was a strong influence on the modernist art that followed. Today many of his pieces—including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers—are among the world's most recognizable and expensive works of art.