The Starry Night (1889)

How to look at it

Start at the dark cypress on the left and let it carry your eye up past the horizon. Follow the great swirl across the middle of the sky as it rolls like a wave. Then find the stars, each wrapped in rings of light, and the orange crescent moon at the top right. Last, drop down to the village: a small church spire and lit windows, perfectly calm under all that motion.

Why this one

A real sky, a remembered village. He wrote to his brother Theo that he watched the countryside from his window "a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." The hills and the bright star are what he saw. The village was not in his window view; MoMA says it came from other views. To our eye its spire looks more northern than Provençal.

Motion in every stroke. The sky is built from short, thick, curving strokes laid side by side, so it seems to turn as you look. Calm below, turbulence above: that tension is why the picture feels alive.

He was not sure it worked. In November 1889 he told the painter Émile Bernard he had let himself be "led astray into reaching for stars that are too big – another failure" (letter 822). He does not name the painting, but it is generally read as this one. Around 18 June 1889 he had described it to Theo simply as "a new study of a starry sky" (letter 782).

The cypress. It rises like a flame and links the earth to the sky. Many viewers read it as a stand-in for the painter himself.

This canvas

Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm (29 × 36¼ in), June 1889, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Catalogue F612 / JH1731. The canvas has hung in New York since 1941.

Fact gap. This was not painted at night. Van Gogh worked it up in daytime sessions in June 1889, adding a village he could not see from his window. It is also not the 1888 Starry Night over the Rhône. See what the record says.

Sizes vs the original

• 8×10 a desk or shelf piece, the whole sky in your hand
• 16×20 about half the real canvas, the swirl reads from across a room
• 24×30 about four-fifths of its true size (29×36¼), for a wall that wants the night

Paper & ship

Archival matte fine art paper, no bleed, true 4:5 proportion. Printed from a public domain gigapixel photograph of the canvas without remastering the color. Made to order, rolled in a tube. A black or walnut hairline frame both suit it.

Quick answers

Where was The Starry Night painted? At the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, in June 1889.

Is this an original painting? No. It is an archival reproduction of the 1889 canvas.

Is the image public domain? Yes. Van Gogh died in 1890, and the photograph we print from is a faithful public domain reproduction (Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons). No museum endorses this shop.

Will the large size look sharp? Yes. The source photograph is 44,567 pixels wide, far more than a 24×30 print needs.