The Starry Night

Van Gogh painted this swirling night in June of 1889, while he was staying at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He had checked himself in after a rough stretch, and the scene shows the countryside he could see from his window. The cozy little village with its pointed church steeple, though, came straight from his imagination. Oddly enough, he worked on it during the day, painting the stars entirely from memory rather than gazing up at the real thing.

The whole sky seems to move here. Thick, twisting brushstrokes roll across the canvas in deep blues and glowing yellows, turning the heavens into something alive and restless. That dark, flame-shaped form rising on the left is a cypress tree, long tied to death and cemeteries, stretching upward toward the swirling light. The mix of calm rolling hills and churning sky gives the painting its strange, dreamlike energy.

The saddest twist is that van Gogh thought this work was a failure. He barely sold a single painting in his lifetime and never guessed that this one would become a global treasure, admired today by millions of visitors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.