Van Gogh Stars are accurate
We can tell when he painted within a day or two - he was that good !!!
When the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of illuminated star dust in 2004, scientists examined the celestial rendering only to find it oddly familiar. The swirls and billows of stellar turbulence bore an uncanny resemblance to The Starry Night (1889), a painted masterpiece forged within the walls of a French insane asylum over a century earlier. The mystery was then as it is now: without possible awareness of this astronomical phenomenon, Vincent van Gogh depicted it with arresting precision.
It was six months after his infamous episode of aural mutilation that Vincent van Gogh checked into Saint-Paul de Mausole Asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His admission was voluntary, and he would create 142 paintings during his time there. Among them was The Starry Night, one of the prolific artist’s most impactful landscapes.
Today, The Starry Night is a jewel in the crown of MoMA’s permanent collection in New York City. Revered as a paradigm of post-impressionism, the painting’s tranquil stillness juxtaposes, perhaps somewhat jarringly, the circumstances of its troubled genesis. In the artist’s months of remission following his notorious act of self-harm, van Gogh seems to have found peaceful moments of harmony not only in, but with nature.
Letters sent to his beloved brother Theo indicate a period of fragile optimism. “This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” he wrote. Its splendor prompted van Gogh’s timeless portrayal, in which it glows over a sleepy village of rolling hills and verdant cypress trees.
Yet perhaps no element of The Starry Night is as recognizable as the air currents unfurling across the sky. This emotive effect of ethereal movement was achieved through the painter’s employment of luminance, “a measure of the relative brightness between different points,” NPR defines. “The eye is more sensitive to luminance change than to color change, meaning we respond more promptly to changes in brightness than in colors. This is what gives many Impressionist paintings that familiar and emotionally moving twinkle.”
Indeed, the luminosity of van Gogh’s brushstrokes is visually remarkable; but what makes The Starry Night truly extraordinary exists outside the realm of the art historian.