Thursday, April 16, 2020

Interesting Art Stories: 7. The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, ACJ Art Academy



How are you?

On every Thursday, I am introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the title “Interesting Art Stories”.

The 7th story for this week is "The Starry Night" by a Dutch post-impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh.

The Starry Night” is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it describes the real view through the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an ideal village. It is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Self Portrait (1887)

After an incident that he mutilated his left ear on December 23, 1888, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. The asylum, a former monastery, was accommodating the wealthy, and when Van Gogh was hospitalized, it was less than half full, so he could use not only a second-floor bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as his painting studio.

The Monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole

During his stay at the asylum, Van Gogh painted some of his most famous works, including the “Irises” now in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the “self-portrait” in the Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted around June 18, the date he wrote to his brother Theo that he had a new painting of a starry sky. This work was painted in the studio on the ground floor used by Van Gogh during the day, but the claim that he drew this picture from memory is not an exact expression. This is because Van Gogh painted more than 21 times what he saw in his bedroom window, one of which was identified as “The Starry Night”.

Irises (May 1889)

Self portrait without beard (September 1889)

The hospital did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, but allowed sketching in ink or charcoal on paper, and in this situation he continued to create new versions based on previous versions. The Starry Night” is the only nocturne work in the series of views what he saw in his bedroom window. In early June, Van Gogh wrote a letter to Theo: "This morning I saw the countryside from my window for a long time before sunrise with only the morning star remaining, which looked very big”. The brightest star in this picture, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is “Venus” that Van Gogh thought it was the 'morning star' and it was indeed visible at dawn in Provence at the time. At the time of 1889, it was confirmed by scholars that Venus was so close to Earth that it could be actually seen at dawn and was the brightest.

According to astronomical records, the moon was its waning crescent when Van Gogh painted this work, therefore the moon he drew in this painting is not astronomically correct and stylized. Also, the only thing in the picture that is not visible from his bedroom window is the village, which is known to be based on sketches drawn from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Also, the cypress tree depicted in the painting is a plant related to death, suggesting that only death can take us to the star.

Van Gogh has written a lot of letters, but he rarely mentioned this painting. After mentioning it in a letter saying that he drew a starry sky in June, Van Gogh included the painting in a list of paintings sending to his brother Theo in Paris, writing "the only things I consider a little good in the list 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”. Among them, “The Starry Night” was included in “the rest”. In addition, Van Gogh first excluded three paintings from the list to save the postage, and The Starry Night was one of them he didn't send. As another example, in a letter to a painter and his friend Émile Bernard, Van Gogh referred to the painting as "failure." In other words, it can be interpreted as Van Gogh did not satisfy with the painting.

In addition, Van Gogh preferred working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to the latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles. The first painting in the series depicting the night is the “Café Terrace at Night” in Arles in early September 1888, and the next one is the “Starry Night Over the Rhône” in the same month.

Café Terrace at Night (1888)

Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888)

After Van Gogh and Theo died, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger became the legacy manager of Van Gogh. She sold the painting to poet Julien Leclercq in Paris in 1900, and he sold it back to Gauguin's old friend Émile Schuffenecker in 1901, and then Johanna bought it again from Schuffenecker in 1906. 

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

It was later owned by Georgette P. van Stolk in Rotterdam from 1906 to 1938. Then, he sold it to Paul Rosenberg, and finally the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased it from Rosenberg in 1941, and the museum possesses this painting since then.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA

The scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York performed a pigment analysis of this painting. According to the results of the analysis, the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and the stars and the moon used the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.

Thank you.




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