I was looking back over some older posts, wondering what I could do for this week’s midweek offering, and I stumbled across a couple of pieces I wrote in Autumn 2021, to show off my knowledge of art history and to prove that I hadn’t wasted my time at university, where this was part of the course I studied. In case you’re interested, the first was about Richard Dadd and the second was about Edvard Munch. Both were reworkings of posts I originally wrote back in 2014, but as it is quite some time since those I thought I’d expose you to some more of my knowledge by sharing a new piece, about what is probably one of the most famous paintings in the world – you’ll see it as the header picture.

The painting is, of course, The Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh (aka Starry Night for those who can’t cope with three word titles). As Wikipedia tells us, the painting was created in mid-June 1889, inspired by the view from Van Gogh’s bedroom window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, a  former monastery which had been repurposed, where Van Gogh had voluntarily admitted himself on 8 May 1889, following a mental breakdown and his infamous ear incident in late December 1888. The asylum mainly cared for wealthy patients and due to that selectivity was less than half full at the time of Van Gogh’s admission, so he was able to gain access to both his second-storey bedroom and a ground-floor room which they let him use as a studio. He was there for a year and painted much, including his well-known Irises, a self-portrait, and The Starry Night. This painting shows the planet Venus, which was visible from Earth at that time, though the depiction of the Moon isn’t thought to be accurate, by those who know more about this than I. He enlarged the cypress trees in the foreground for artistic effect, and added the village scene too – no such village could be seen from the asylum.

The Starry Night has given critics a field day to invent interpretations of what it is about: some say it has religious symbolism while others claim that it represents the emotional turmoil he was going through at that time. Van Gogh himself didn’t like the painting very much, and, referred to it as a “failure” in one of his many letters to his brother, Theo. Theo inherited the painting after Vincent’s death in July 1890. Following Theo’s death six months after Vincent’s, the work passed to Theo’s widow, Jo. She sold it in 1901 to Émile Schuffenecker who, like Van Gogh, was also a Post-Impressionist artist. He then sold it back to Jo in 1905. From 1906 to 1938 it was owned by someone called Georgette P. van Stolk, of Rotterdam. Paul Rosenberg, a French art dealer, bought it from van Stolk in 1938 and sold it in an exchange to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, where it remains to this day. In case you were wondering, it is a medium-sized painting, measuring 36″ wide by 29″ high. 

Vincent Van Gogh was Dutch, having been born in the southern Netherlands town of Zundert in March 1853. He was a troubled soul, and died at the age of just 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He has since become one of the most influential figures in the art of the western world, having created approximately 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His works include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are in the same bold colours and dramatic brushwork that you can see in The Starry Night, which contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art (maybe something for another day!). Van Gogh’s work was only beginning to gain critical attention before he died: during his lifetime, only one of his paintings, The Red Vineyard, was sold. If only he could have lived to see how much of a star he has since become – sadly, not the first or last person about whom that can be said. Some of his paintings are among the most expensive ever sold – a remarkable legacy to have left.

Perhaps by now you may be wondering if I would be playing a famous song about this painting. Well, stop your wondering, here it is:

Don McLean released Vincent on his second album, American Pie, in October 1971, which reached #1 in the US, Canada and Australia and #2 in the UK. The title track was released as a single the following month, and remarkably shared identical chart placings to the album, in the process selling 3m copies in the US and 1.3m in the UK. Vincent was the follow up single, in February 1972, and it did well in the US, a #12, and in Canada and Australia where it reached #3. It fared best in the UK, though as it reached #1 here. It is a beautiful song, and a perfect tribute to an incredible artist and a wonderful painting.

If you enjoyed this please let me know, and maybe I’ll add it to my growing collection of occasional series – though perhaps a little sooner than waiting another four years!

And with apologies to those of you who speak proper English and also know how to pronounce these foreign names, I leave you with a final thought: