Eleven stars and a rolling sky
Start with the size, because it surprises people: The Starry Night is not a wall-filler. It is about 2 feet 5 inches tall and 3 feet a quarter-inch wide(73.7 by 92.1 centimeters, the museum’s measurement), an easel-sized oil on canvas. All of that turbulence is packed into a picture you could carry under one arm. Now walk through it, top to bottom.
The sky is the event. It is built in thick impasto (paint heaped on so heavily that the brush leaves standing ridges and furrows you can read as texture) in deep ultramarine and cobalt blue, with the stars and moon scratched in warm yellow. The whole upper half rolls and curls in enormous spirals, eddies of paint that no real night sky has ever produced. They are pure invention, the single most important fact about the picture: this is a sky felt and made, not a sky observed.
Venus, the wrong moon, the cypress
Find the brightest point first. Out toward the center of the sky, just to the right of the dark central tree, sits the largest and warmest “star.” That is not a star but the planet Venus, the morning star Van Gogh named in his letter, and the one celestial body here you can tie to something he actually saw. Then look upper right, at the glowing crescent moon: it is astronomically wrong. On the real date the moon was a waning gibbous, nearly full, not a thin crescent. The crescent is a choice, not a record, one more proof the picture is composed.
Down the left edge climbs the cypress, a dark green spire pushed far larger and closer than life until it reads like a flame. Cypresses were a Saint-Rémy obsession he painted over and over that year, and they carry an old freight: across Provence the cypress is the tree of graveyards and mourning, the dark spire that stands over the dead. Van Gogh exaggerates its scale on purpose and stands it in the foreground so that the one plant most tied to death rises straight up through the picture, the single living thing tall enough to bridge the sleeping earth and the churning sky.
The invented village, the one real range
Now the lower band. The sleeping village sits in the dead center, small houses with little yellow windows clustered around a tall, thin church steeple. The village is largely invented, and the steeple in particular is more northern-Dutch than Provençal, the clearest sign that the picture is synthesized rather than transcribed. Behind the town runs the one topographically real element: the low rolling blue hills of the Alpilles, the range just south of Saint-Rémy. Above them, the stars (roughly a dozen, by the usual count) blaze inside their spirals. Real range, real planet, real cypress motif; invented village, invented moon-phase, invented sky. That mixture is the whole picture.