Van Gogh’s starry skies

Vincent van Gogh loved the night sky. “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream,” the Dutch painter wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, in 1888. It was the year he began painting some of his most famous images of starry skies. He had moved from Paris to Arles in the south of France during a period of extreme mental illness, which plagued him for much of his life.

In September 1888, Van Gogh painted two of his starry sky pictures of Arles after dark. Café Terrace at Night was the first — an evening idyll showing a cobbled street with a warmly lit cafe, its tables spilling into the street and, above, bright pinpoints of stars in a deep blue sky. The scene today seems preposterous: an urban street over which stars could visibly be seen. But in 1888, electric lighting was a new invention and Arles would still have had only soft-glowing gas lamps or flame for illumination.

A couple of weeks after the cafe, Van Gogh painted a night sky along the town’s riverside promenade, today known as Starry Night Over the Rhône. The evocative scene depicts a dark night rendered in rich blue tones with a couple on a romantic riverside stroll and, beyond, the soft reflections of gaslamps and stars in the Rhône’s waters. 

A year later in 1889, Van Gogh was in such mental agony, suffering from psychotic episodes and severe alcoholism, that he checked into a psychiatric hospital in the village of Saint-Rémy 15 miles northeast of Arles. It was here that he painted what has become one of his most well-known paintings: The Starry Night, a bombastic, swirling blue scene with oversized stars and a crescent moon hanging brilliantly above the French village.

Although exaggerated and fantastical (astronomers have confirmed, for example, that the Moon would have been in its full, rather than crescent phase at the time Van Gogh worked on it), the sky was drawn from the artist’s lived experience. He would’ve had a clear view of the evening sky from his psychiatric cell at Saint-Rémy and took refuge in the stars for escape. He wrote to his sister Willemien, “The night is even more richly colored than the day, colored in the most intense violets, blues, and greens. Some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow.” 

I had the privilege of seeing Starry Night Over the Rhône this week at a new exhibition, “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” being held at the U.K.’s National Gallery in London. The exhibition brings together some of Van Gogh’s most beloved paintings, several of which are held in private collections and are rarely seen in public. It portrays how the two years the artist spent in the south of France revolutionized his style, adding poetic color and the swirling textures for which he has become so famous.

Starry Night Over the Rhône is displayed prominently in the exhibition hall and drew a huge crowd that never seemed to dissipate. I stood back and watched as people filed up in a line to get close to the painting, inspecting its swirling yellow stars and rich, dark blue background. Many took pictures and selfies and a few, including myself, wandered back to the painting several times for a second and third look. Despite the extraordinary collection of Van Gogh’s work — there were four rooms full of stunning paintings including his famed sunflower pictures and self-portraits — it was the night sky image that seemed to capture people’s imagination most vividly.

But these starry sky paintings for which Van Gogh is now so famous were not well-known during his lifetime. The Starry Night was not even exhibited until 50 years after his death and did not attract much attention at all until it was finally purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (where it still hangs) in 1941. It became an instant sensation whose popularity has not waned since.

There could be several reasons for this — an artist’s work is often more popular posthumously and the painting no doubt benefitted from MoMA’s marketing. But I have another theory: in Van Gogh’s time, a starry sky would have been ordinary and accessible to everyone on Earth. A common sight visible on any clear night anywhere in the world. In that way, the people of Van Gogh’s time simply may not have found the scenes particularly sensational.

But by 1941 when the painting became popular, New York City had been highly electrified with street lights throughout the city. The first neon sign was installed in Times Square in 1924 advertising automaker Willys-Overland, and by the 1940s, the city was ablaze with bulbs and neon lights. By then, a starry night sky was likely enough of a novelty for New Yorkers to marvel at Van Gogh’s imagery. Of course, this is just my guess, but the ongoing rise of light pollution — now growing at 10% every year — has certainly contributed to the continuing popularity of these paintings, whose prominent stars have become an exotic scene for most of us.

The sad fact is that had Van Gogh been alive today, he would not have been able to paint these iconic pictures. The sky above Arles and Saint-Rémy today is very polluted — Saint-Rémy sits at a 5 on the Bortle light pollution scale (washed out with no view of the Milky Way). And the riverside quay where he painted Starry Night Over the Rhône is worse at a 6 out of 9 on the scale. The same sky simply is not visible there now.

From Van Gogh’s paintings to the music of Frédéric Chopin and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the starry night sky has inspired human creativity since the dawn of time. Its depletion due to light pollution is undoubtedly the loss of an immeasurable source of artistic inspiration for all of humankind. 

As a writer myself who has been inspired and comforted by the night sky just as Van Gogh was, I’m so grateful for the work being put in by DarkSky’s staff and Advocates all over the world to restore the night so that generations to come may once again see Van Gogh’s starry skies for themselves.

“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” runs at the National Gallery in London until January 19, 2025. More information at: nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/van-gogh-poets-and-lovers

Starry Night Over the Rhône is normally on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. 

The famous The Starry Night painting is on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Café Terrace at Night is at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.

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