The Starry Night

A swirling night sky over a sleeping village, painted by daylight in an asylum studio, that its own maker called a failure.

1. 1
   The one star he actually named

   The single largest, brightest “star,” out toward the center of the sky, just to the right of the central cypress

   This is not a star at all but the planet Venus, the morning star, the one celestial body Van Gogh names in his letter to Theo, where he wrote that he had seen the countryside before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big. It is the single element on the canvas you can tie to a documented observation, and astronomical records confirm Venus was prominent at dawn in Provence that spring.
2. 2
   The moon that is astronomically wrong

   Upper right, the glowing yellow-orange crescent

   The moon glows as a thin crescent, but on the real date the moon over Saint-Rémy was a waning gibbous, nearly full. So the crescent is an invention, not a record. It is the cleanest proof on the canvas that this is a composed picture, not a transcription of one night’s sky.
3. 3
   The flame that is a tree

   Foreground left, the dark spire that climbs the whole left edge

   A cypress, pushed far larger and closer than life until it reads like a dark green flame licking up into the stars. Cypresses were a Saint-Rémy obsession Van Gogh painted again and again that year. Nothing forces it to that size; he chose to exaggerate it, and the deliberate distortion is the heart of why the picture feels modern rather than observed.
4. 4
   The village that was never there

   Lower center, the cluster of houses around a tall, thin church steeple

   The sleeping town sits under the sky with a tall narrow steeple rising from it, and that steeple is more Dutch and northern than anything in Provence. The village is largely invented, not the actual view from his barred window. It is the tell that the whole picture is synthesized in the studio, the real and the imagined stitched together.
5. 5
   The sky that no sky has ever done

   Across the whole upper half, the great curling eddies and the scattered stars

   The stars (roughly a dozen, by the usual count) sit inside enormous rolling spirals of paint that no real night sky has ever produced. This is pure expressive invention, laid on in thick ridges of pigment (impasto, paint heaped so high the brush leaves standing furrows you can read as texture). The swirls are often read as a vision of his illness, but that is interpretation, not fact; Van Gogh himself denied a romantic or religious program for the picture.
6. 6
   The one real thing along the bottom of the sky

   The low band of rolling blue hills along the horizon, behind the village

   These are the Alpilles, the low mountain range just south of Saint-Rémy, and they are the one topographically real backdrop element in the painting. Everything above them swirls into invention; the hills are the thin thread of the actual valley he could see.