The Starry Night
The object
the steepled church in the village beneath the sky
The story
Van Gogh painted The Starry Night from the window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He could see olive groves, the cypress tree, the surrounding hills, but Saint-Rémy has no village with a sharply pointed church steeple of this kind. The steeple is Dutch. Van Gogh was homesick. He inserted into the southern French landscape a remembered silhouette of a Dutch village from his childhood, almost certainly Zundert in North Brabant, where his father was the minister. Now at Museum of Modern Art, New York @themuseumofmodernart
The reel
The painting
