Starry Night Silk Scarf

In May 1889, Vincent van Gogh voluntarily committed himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, tormented by the mental breakdowns that had already cost him his ear and his friendship with Gauguin. From his room on the upper floor he could see, through iron-barred windows, a sweeping view of the countryside below a vast, churning sky. It was from this view — real and transformed — that he conjured Starry Night in June 1889, working in a white heat of creative energy during a period of relative calm between episodes. The painting is simultaneously a record and a transfiguration. The village below — modelled loosely on Saint-Rémy — is rendered with a kind of tender quietude: dark cypress trees reaching upward like flames, church steeple pointing heavenward, houses nestled in the valley. But the sky above is pure emotional truth rather than optical fact. Eleven swirling nebulae of colour spiral and pulsate across the canvas, stars blazing with halos of yellow and white, a crescent moon sending out its own luminous corona. Van Gogh had absorbed the astronomical drawings he had seen in illustrated magazines, and the cosmos he painted is both scientifically informed and psychologically raw — the sky as he felt it, not merely as he saw it. Van Gogh himself was ambivalent about the painting, calling it an "abstraction" and worrying that he had gone too far from observed reality. He sent it to his brother Theo in Paris, where it largely disappeared from view until MoMA acquired it in 1941. Now it is the most visited artwork in their collection, a painting that has become a kind of secular icon — proof that beauty can be born from the deepest suffering, and that a single human mind, even at its most fractured, can hold the entire universe within it.

Vincent van Gogh, 1889