{"id":106422,"date":"2025-02-24T04:31:31","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T04:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/art\/the-starry-night-is-vincent-van-goghs-magnum-opus-what-drives-its-ev-artisera\/"},"modified":"2025-02-24T04:31:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T04:31:31","slug":"the-starry-night-is-vincent-van-goghs-magnum-opus-what-drives-its-ev-artisera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=106422","title":{"rendered":"The Starry Night is Vincent van Gogh\u2019s Magnum Opus. What Drives its Ev \u2013 Artisera"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Born in the Netherlands in 1853, Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated artists of the 19th century. His iconic painting, The Starry Night<\/em>, an oil on canvas from 1889, is not only a landmark of post-impressionistic art, but also one of the most famous paintings in the world.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

A short and anguished career<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before becoming an artist, van Gogh pursued various careers – as an art dealer, teacher and a missionary. At the age of 27, in 1880, he finally began his artistic journey when he enrolled in classes at the Acad\u00e9mie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. After only a decade of working as an artist, van Gogh\u2019s career reached an untimely halt in 1890, due to his death by suicide at an early age of thirty-seven. The creative genius was diagnosed with mental illness and had periodic stretches of depression and incredibly concentrated artistic activity. Surprisingly, in the mere 10 years as an artist, Vincent van Gogh produced an extensive body of work – with around 900\u00a0paintings\u00a0and 1100 drawings and sketches. As his brother Theo van Gogh died only six months after Vincent, his artworks were eventually inherited by his sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. In an attempt to reveal his intense passion for art to the world, Jo published the letters exchanged between Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, launching van Gogh into his roaring posthumous fame as a misunderstood genius.<\/p>\n

\"\"On the left is Vincent\u2019s 1887 portrait of Theo van Gogh. On the right is Theo\u2019s wife, Jo Van Gogh-Bonger with her son Vincent Willem at the studio of Raoul Saisset, Paris, 1890 (Source: artsy.net)<\/em><\/p>\n

Brief history of The Starry Night <\/strong><\/p>\n

Mid-June in 1889, van Gogh painted The Starry Night<\/em> as a reinterpretation of the view from his room\u2019s window at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-R\u00e9my, France. He was admitted to the countryside asylum for a year, as a consequence of his breakdown and self-amputation of his left ear. As van Gogh wasn\u2019t allowed to paint in his room, The Starry Night<\/em> was one of the several paintings created in a separate studio during the day, based on his night-time views from his room\u2019s window. As The Starry Night<\/em> was a recollection of the view from his memory, van Gogh seems to have painted the episode of his view and what it instinctively made him feel, rather than an isolated account of the landscape in the view. As it was an expression of his stimulation, it gave way for the surrounding elements of his cerebral atmosphere to enter the painting too. The village in the painting seems to be drawn from the memories of his native village in the Netherlands, as a panoramic village is not known to be visible from his window. The cypress tree dominating the foreground in the left seems to be closer than it should have been, while the moon seems to be stylized too, as astronomical records indicate that it was waning gibbous at the time van Gogh painted The Starry Night<\/em>. Several such inconsistencies in van Gogh\u2019s depiction of the view indicate that his loyalty lay in deciphering the emotional language of the view, rather than\u00a0its original details.<\/p>\n

\"\"The men\u2019s wing of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, where van Gogh painted The Starry Night (Source: artandobject.com)<\/em><\/p>\n

The stirring whirls in the sky seem to be a simultaneous expression of his turbulent mental state, as well as the exciting events of the night sky. Vincent van Gogh\u2019s depiction of stars as yellow swirls instead of the white specks they are typically shown as, emphasizes the fact that the painting is a lucid account of van Gogh\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

In one of his letters to Theo, van Gogh mentioned that he found the night sky \u201cmuch more alive and richly coloured than the day\u201d. His genius lay in the use of colour and textures to invoke universal emotions. The potent bursts of yellow and white studded in the fierce waves of the night-blue sky, were a result of unleashing the paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, creating a dense impasto effect that supported the intense hues.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"The drawing titled Cypresses in Starry Night, a reed pen copy executed by van Gogh after painting The Starry Night<\/em><\/p>\n

Tracking the events around the popularity of The Starry Night<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired The Starry Night, w<\/em>here it has been housed since. Though van Gogh\u2019s The Starry Night<\/em> in its harmonious hues and captivating patterns was already acclaimed by art connoisseurs, it was not quite famous yet. One of the reasons for its whooping popularity today, is the Hubble space telescope\u2019s image released by NASA in 2004, that revealed parallels between celestial currents observed in outer space and van Gogh\u2019s patterns in the painting.<\/p>\n

Astronomers said the Hubble image released on Thursday “bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles [kilometres] of interstellar space.” <\/em>– an excerpt from the CNN article titled \u201cHubble image said to echo van Gogh\u2019s The Starry Night\u201d<\/em>, posted on Friday, March 5, 2004.<\/p>\n

\"\"Hubble image of the star “V838 Mon” and its light echo (Source: Wikimedia Commons)<\/em><\/p>\n

The NASA image imitating van Gogh\u2019s The Starry Night<\/em> is of the telescope\u2019s view of an expanding halo of light, known as light echo – around one of the most luminous stars in the entire Milky Way, V838 Mon. During a similar event in 2002, the otherwise faint star suddenly brightened, becoming 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun. Several research studies have been conducted since this event, where the eddy currents observed around the stars in our galaxy were comparable to the lines of agitations around van Gogh\u2019s stars and planets in The Starry Night<\/em>. His imaginative depiction of the celestial bodies reflected in the galactic events observed later on, grandly validating van Gogh\u2019s unique perspective of the world expressed in The Starry Night.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"An incredible recreation of The Starry Night with Hubble images by Alex Harrison Parker (Source: alexharrisonparker.com)
<\/em><\/p>\n

Several books and movies have been released, that shed light on van Gogh\u2019s emotional and mental journey as an artist in graphic detail. As revealed in these books and movies, it was his emotional capacity and sentiments towards his art, that make van Gogh\u2019s work incredibly stimulating and meaningful to this day. The Starry Night<\/em> will likely be studied and analysed for eternity, not just for its artistic beauty, but also as a fascinating intersection between the artist\u2019s imagination and the resemblant occurrences in outer space.<\/p>\n

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