STARRY NIGHT:

Starry Night is an oil painting done on the canvas by the famous Dutch impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. This painting was painted in the month of June in the year 1889. The painting portrays the view from the east facing window of the artist's asylum room at saint-Remy-de-Provence just before the sunrise with the addition of an idealized village. The starry night painting has been kept as a permanent collection in the museum of art since 1941 in the city of New York. This is one finest art works of Vincent Van Gogh when compared to all of his works. The starry night painting has been the most recognized painting in the history of modern culture.

STARRY NIGHT

THE ASYLUM AND PAINTING:

The starry night painting depicts the view of an east facing window of the artists asylum room. The artists has depicted the view at different times of day and under various conditions, including sunrise, moonrise, sunshine filled days, windy days, one day with the rain and overcast days. While the hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint he managed to make at least the sketches in ink or charcoal paper. This is how the starry night painting was made.

VAN GOGH'S BEDROOM IN ASYLUM

INTERPRETATIONS:

Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night. After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on or about 20 September 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as a "night study". Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided to hold back three paintings from this batch to save money on postage, The Starry Night was one of the paintings he did not send. Finally, in a letter to painter Emile Bernard from late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure".

PAINTING MATERIALS:

The painting was investigated by scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and for the stars and the moon, Van Gogh employed the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.