The man at the barred window

In the spring of 1889 a Dutch painter walked, of his own free will, into a mental asylum in the south of France and asked to be let in. He was Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), one of the Post-Impressionists (the school that took the Impressionists’ bright broken color and pushed it back toward structure and feeling). What matters here is the state he was in. The previous December, in the town of Arles, he had suffered a breakdown so severe that he cut off part of his own ear, the crisis that ended his short, doomed attempt to live and work alongside Paul Gauguin, the French painter whose dream of a shared “Studio of the South” Van Gogh had bought into completely. On 8 May 1889 he admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a former monastery in the hills.

He was not, however, a man who had stopped working. The asylum gave him two rooms: a bedroom with an east-facing window, fitted with iron bars, that looked out over the valley, and a separate ground-floor room he could use as a studio. That arrangement is the whole geography of this painting, so hold it: he saw the night sky from the barred bedroom window, and he painted in the studio downstairs. The two were not the same room.

Out that east window lay the valley of Saint-Rémy and, low along the horizon, the Alpilles (al-PEE), a small rolling mountain range. Before dawn the sky over those hills filled with stars and, that particular spring, with one very bright point of light low in the east. The night sky of this valley became a recurring subject for him through the months he spent locked up here. So the famous story that The Starry Nightshows “the view from his asylum window” is true in one careful sense and badly misleading in another. The short version: he was looking at a real piece of sky, and he was about to do something to it that no window ever showed.