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Vincent van Gogh: ‘Starry Night’ 1889.
Starry Night is the image (perhaps with Wheatfield with Crows, 1890) that epitomises his lifelong task - “ trying to learn how to express himself perfectly, and to capture on canvas the beauty and horror of his world.”
From the moment of his arrival in Arles, on 8 February 1888, Van Gogh was constantly preoccupied with the representation of "night effects". In April 1888, he wrote to his brother Theo: "I need a starry night with cypresses or maybe above a field of ripe wheat." In June, he confided to the painter Emile Bernard: "But when shall I ever paint the Starry Sky, this painting that keeps haunting me" and, in September, in a letter to his sister, he evoked the same subject: "Often it seems to me night is even more richly coloured than day". During the same month of September, he finally realised his obsessive project.
Photographs of spiral galaxies, such as The Andromeda Galaxy, were starting to appear as half-tone plates in scientific journals around this time, though whether Van Gogh saw any is unknown. We do know that Venus was visible and shining brightly during June 1889, when van Gogh was frenetically painting Starry Night. During this latter period in his life, suffering from a kind of ‘mental epilepsy’ he was producing a painting every day for around 70 days in a row. Starry Night gives us some insight into van Gogh’s mental state, the whirling turmoil of a hot, high summer night in Saint-Rémy-de- Provence, just north-west of Arles in southern France. In his famous letters to his brother Theo (see The Real Van Gogh - The Artist and his Letters Royal Academy 2010) he suggests that he was composing both from sketches and from imagination - he calls it ‘an amalgum of images’. (Gauguin called this an abstraction - a painting conceived in the imagination) - the village of Saint-Remy is not visible from his rooms at the sanitorium. Starry Night is widely regarded as a visionary painting and one of the best of his entire life. There is a William Blake/Samuel Palmer mystical feel to this work that has inspired artists ever since... In 1971, Don McLean had a hit with his song Vincent, inspired by Starry Night.