The picture he called a failure

The strangest thing about the most reproduced night sky in the world is that the man who painted it did not think it had worked. Van Gogh called it a “night study,” and in a letter of late November 1889 to his fellow painter Émile Bernard he described it as a relative failure, saying he had “reached for stars that are too big.” That self-criticism was not modesty; it was a position in a real argument. He and Gauguin had quarreled for months about whether to paint from the imagination or from nature, and Van Gogh, who distrusted painting purely from the head, suspected that in The Starry Night he had drifted too far into invention. The picture we treat as his triumph, he treated as a warning to himself.

It was certainly no triumph in the market. The Starry Night was never sold in his lifetime, and it sold no better than the rest of his work, which is to say not at all. Its entire fame is posthumous; in 1889 it was a study a sick painter half-disowned.

Which is the moment to kill a famous line, because it always attaches itself here. You will hear that Van Gogh “only ever sold one painting in his whole life.” That is a myth. What is true is narrower: The Red Vineyard is the only painting we can document being sold, bought by the Belgian painter Anna Boch for about 400 francs out of the Les XX exhibition in Brussels in early 1890. But the Van Gogh Museum itself records that he also traded works, that an uncle commissioned some, and that there is evidence of at least one other sale. So “only one documented sale” is fair; the flat “he sold only one painting ever” is not. Either way, it does not change this picture’s fate: nobody bought The Starry Night while he lived.