Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889, a year before his death, while at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The scene is dominated by a dynamic vision of bright stars and planets swirling over a tranquil, moon-lit landscape. We see a village and softly-rounded mountains, with fields and trees in the background. In the left foreground, the top of an aromatic cypress gently sways in the wind, rising like incense smoke, or prayer, to the sky (cf. Psalm 140:2). The paint is thickly three-dimensional, conveying light, movement, and energy. 

Much has been written about this canvas, the artist’s disturbed state of mind, his religiosity, as well as the eerie correspondence between this depiction of celestial bodies and what space telescopes show us that stars and the trillions of galaxies we have observed—such as the spectacular Fireworks and Whirlpool galaxies—look like.

One fruitful way of approaching Starry Night is through an 1888 letter written by Vincent to his brother Theo, in which the artist talks of his dreamy fascination with stars and with ‘dots on a map’ (representing towns), and how, just as we take a train to visit a place, we will ‘take death’ to visit stars, as they are inaccessible to the living (Letter 638). The artist’s religious longing for such a journey is further hinted at by the centrality of the church, with its tall steeple probing the sky.

A deep contemplation of the glory of the stars—whether the dominant swirling patterns moving through the sky are read as the Milky Way or as God’s ‘sending out his command to the earth’ (Psalm 147:15)—the painting invites the viewer to imagine how it might feel to gain admittance to this dazzling work of God (v.4).

References

Van Gogh, Vincent. 1888. ‘Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, c.9 July 1888’, trans. by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, ed. by Robert Harrison, #506, http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/506.htm [accessed 6 October 2020]