Van Gogh and the Moon: from The Starry Night to moonlit sheaves

For Vincent van Gogh the night sky was not a dark backdrop but a living surface, full of colour. In the last two years of his life, between Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the Dutch painter repeatedly painted stars and Moon, trying to render the vibration of light in the dark. Among these works stands out The Starry Night, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which a radiant crescent Moon dominates the upper right corner of the canvas.

Painting the night from life

As early as autumn 1888, in Arles, Van Gogh had tackled the night in the open air. In Café Terrace at Night, now at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, and in Starry Night over the Rhône, at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the deep blue sky is dotted with stars rendered in small touches of yellow and white. In the letters of those months the painter observed that the night often seemed to him richer in colour than the day.

To work in the dark, according to a much repeated but poorly documented story, he is said to have fixed candles to his hat. Beyond the anecdote, it is certain that Van Gogh regarded night painting as a technical challenge: giving up black and building darkness with blues, violets and greens set beside luminous yellows and oranges.

The Starry Night of Saint-Rémy

In May 1889 Van Gogh voluntarily entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy. From the window of his room, facing east, he could see a wheat field enclosed by a wall and, further off, the hills of the Alpilles. In a letter to his brother Theo he wrote that he had long watched the countryside before dawn, when only the morning star remained in the sky, looking very large.

The Starry Night, painted in June of that year, does not, however, reproduce the view as it was. The painter added a village with a bell tower and a large cypress in the foreground, and turned the sky into a whirl of spirals. The Moon, surrounded by a halo that makes it look almost like a small sun, has the shape of a crescent, while the brightest star near the horizon has often been identified as Venus.

Sheaves, cypresses and rising moons

In July 1889 Van Gogh painted Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon, now at the Kröller-Müller Museum. A large orange Moon emerges behind the hills above a harvested wheat field. Working from the topography of the place and the lunar phase, a group of American astronomers has proposed dating the observed scene to the evening of 13 July 1889.

In May 1890, shortly before leaving Saint-Rémy, the painter made Road with Cypress and Star, in which a thin crescent Moon and a shining star flank a towering cypress. Two months later, on 29 July 1890, Van Gogh died at Auvers-sur-Oise, aged thirty-seven, leaving a body of night works unmatched in the painting of his time.

In the European pictorial tradition the Moon had mainly been an element of atmosphere, a source of calm silvery light. Van Gogh turned it into pure energy, a star that pulses together with the stars and the trees. His nights are not quiet but vibrant, and it is precisely this intensity that has made The Starry Night one of the most recognisable images in the history of art.