Van Gogh Starry Night Envelope

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas, 1889, is a landscape painting of a vast swirl of shining stars over a landscape of distant town and rolling hills, with a single cypress tree rising in the foreground like a dark green flame. Van Gogh painted his starry masterpiece not from life but from memory during the daytime, as this was a view from the sanitarium at Saint-Remy de Provence in which the artist stayed after suffering a breakdown. The swirling vortex of brushstrokes of contrasting colors, uniting the earth landscape with stars and movement in the nocturnal sky, made Starry Night one of Van Gogh’s most popular paintings, which since the 20th century has become an icon of Western art.