{
  "slug": "starry-night",
  "glyph": "星",
  "title": "The Starry Night",
  "artist": "Vincent van Gogh",
  "year": "1889",
  "one_line": "the night sky as weather of the soul — painted by day, from a barred room",
  "location_now": "Museum of Modern Art, New York",
  "image": "https://artbitrage.io/art/starry-night-moma.jpg",
  "thumb": "https://artbitrage.io/art/starry-night-moma-t.jpg",
  "feelings": [
    "turbulence",
    "awe",
    "longing",
    "solace"
  ],
  "strata": {
    "feeling": {
      "text": "Stand before it and the sky will not hold still. Eleven stars and a fat lemon moon pulse inside their own haloes while the blue between them rolls up into scrolls — you feel wind before you can name it. Below, a village sleeps, small and warm-windowed; a cypress rears between you and all that motion like a dark flame. It is agitation and comfort at once: the night is enormous, and the night is watching over the houses. Strangest of all, the agitation is real physics. In 2006 researchers showed that the flicker of light across his most troubled-period paintings matches the statistics of turbulent flow, and in 2024 a study of the fourteen swirls found Kolmogorov's law of turbulence — written half a century after his death — hiding in the brushwork. The picture does not depict turbulence; it performs it.",
      "feelings": [
        "turbulence",
        "awe",
        "longing",
        "solace"
      ]
    },
    "hands": {
      "text": "He had been inside Saint-Paul-de-Mausole about six weeks. The ear was six months healed: he had cut into it in Arles on the night of 23 December 1888, and after neighbours petitioned to have him confined, he chose the asylum himself, signing in on 8 May 1889. Theo paid for two small cells with barred windows — one to sleep in, one to paint in. From the bedroom he watched the dawn: 'This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.' That star was Venus, truly blazing that spring. He was not allowed to paint upstairs, so around 18 June he built the night by daylight, in the studio below, partly from memory — real Venus, real Alpilles hills, an invented village, a cypress pulled close. To Theo he called it only 'a new study of a starry sky.'",
      "facts": [
        {
          "claim": "Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear in Arles on the night of 23 December 1888, after a breakdown while living with Gauguin.",
          "source": "https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/vincent-van-gogh-faq/why-did-vincent-van-gogh-cut-off-his-ear"
        },
        {
          "claim": "In February 1889 his Arles neighbours petitioned to have him institutionalised, and he was confined in the Arles hospital before choosing the asylum.",
          "source": "https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/van-Gogh-ear"
        },
        {
          "claim": "He voluntarily entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889; Theo arranged two adjoining cells with barred windows, the second used as a studio.",
          "source": "https://vangoghroute.com/france/saint-remy/saint-paul-de-mausole/"
        },
        {
          "claim": "In letter 777 (c. 31 May–6 June 1889) he described watching the morning star from his window long before sunrise.",
          "source": "https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let777/letter.html"
        },
        {
          "claim": "On or about 18 June 1889 he told Theo he had painted 'a new study of a starry sky' (letter 782), adding that work 'occupies and distracts me – which I need very much'.",
          "source": "https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let782/letter.html"
        },
        {
          "claim": "The picture was painted by day in his ground-floor studio around mid-June 1889; the view from his east-facing bedroom window held wheat fields and hills, while the village was invented and the cypress exaggerated and pulled close.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night"
        },
        {
          "claim": "Astronomical research confirms Venus was visible at dawn in Provence in spring 1889, near its maximum brightness.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night"
        }
      ]
    },
    "world": {
      "text": "France spent 1889 throwing itself a hundredth-birthday party. In Paris the Exposition Universelle opened in May — the centennial fair of the Revolution — and the just-finished Eiffel Tower took in nearly twelve thousand visitors a day; thirty-two million people passed through the fair by autumn. Theo, who paid Vincent's bills from his art-dealer salary, had married Jo Bonger in Amsterdam that April. Seven hundred kilometres south, Provence kept older time: wheat, olives, cicadas, the mistral wind. Saint-Rémy was a small town under the Alpilles, and the asylum — a monastery centuries old, run by Dr Théophile Peyron, once a navy doctor — had rooms to spare, which is how Vincent got a second cell for a studio. While the modern world rode elevators up iron latticework, he walked out with an orderly to paint, and in his year there made roughly 150 paintings.",
      "facts": [
        {
          "claim": "The Exposition Universelle ran in Paris from 6 May to 31 October 1889 (the Eiffel Tower itself opened to visitors 15 May), marking the centennial of the French Revolution; it drew 32,250,297 visitors, 1,953,122 of them up the tower — almost 12,000 a day.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Universelle_(1889)"
        },
        {
          "claim": "Theo van Gogh married Johanna (Jo) Bonger in Amsterdam on 17 April 1889, three weeks before Vincent entered the asylum.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_van_Gogh-Bonger"
        },
        {
          "claim": "The asylum, a former monastery set among wheat fields, vineyards and olive trees, was run by Dr Théophile Peyron, a former naval doctor.",
          "source": "https://vangoghroute.com/france/saint-remy/saint-paul-de-mausole/"
        },
        {
          "claim": "In his year at Saint-Rémy Van Gogh produced about 150 paintings and around 100 drawings.",
          "source": "https://vangoghroute.com/france/saint-remy/saint-paul-de-mausole/"
        }
      ]
    },
    "paint": {
      "text": "The sky is two blues doing different jobs: synthetic ultramarine — the cheap factory-made successor to ground lapis lazuli — for the deep night, and cobalt blue, pricier and cooler, for the bright swirls and the air around the moon. The moon and stars glow with Indian yellow over zinc yellow; emerald green, an arsenic pigment, threads around the moon; ochre, lead white and Prussian blue do quieter work in the village and the cypress. Scientists from RIT and MoMA mapped every pigment with multispectral imaging. One worry hides in the stars: zinc yellow is a chromate, chemical kin of the chrome yellow that X-ray work in 2011 caught browning in his Sunflowers under light. The stars we see now are likely dimmer than the ones he painted. These were modern industrial colours, some only decades old, ordered from Paris on Theo's money.",
      "pigments": [
        {
          "name": "Synthetic (artificial) ultramarine",
          "note": "The deep blue night sky around the stars; a cheap industrial version of the lapis lazuli blue that had once cost more than gold.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "name": "Cobalt blue",
          "note": "The brighter swirling sky and the area around the moon; an expensive cobalt-aluminate blue invented in 1802.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "name": "Indian yellow",
          "note": "The deeper golden glow of moon and stars.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "name": "Zinc yellow",
          "note": "In the moon and stars; a zinc-chromate yellow prone to darkening with light — the stars were likely once brighter.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "name": "Emerald green",
          "note": "Green strokes around the moon; a copper-arsenic pigment, brilliant and poisonous.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "name": "Prussian blue",
          "note": "Likely mixed into the dark green of the cypress.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "name": "Yellow ochre and lead white",
          "note": "The quieter earths and pale bodies of strokes through village and sky.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        }
      ],
      "facts": [
        {
          "claim": "Multispectral imaging by Rochester Institute of Technology and MoMA (Zhao, Berns, Taplin, Coddington) mapped the pigments: ultramarine and cobalt blue in the sky, Indian yellow and zinc yellow in the moon and stars, possibly cadmium yellow in the brightest halos.",
          "source": "https://colourlex.com/project/van-gogh-starry-night/"
        },
        {
          "claim": "X-ray studies published in 2011 showed that chrome yellow (lead chromate) in Van Gogh's paintings darkens under light through photo-reduction of the chromium — the chemistry behind his fading yellows.",
          "source": "https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110214142340.htm"
        },
        {
          "claim": "The painting is oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night"
        }
      ]
    },
    "afterlife": {
      "text": "He sent it to Theo in Paris that autumn and never sold it. Theo died in January 1891, six months after Vincent, and the canvas passed to Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who spent her life making the world see her brother-in-law. She sold it in 1900 to the poet Julien Leclercq; it went to the painter Émile Schuffenecker, then back to Jo, then through Rotterdam's Oldenzeel Gallery to Georgette van Stolk, who kept it from 1906 to 1938. The dealer Paul Rosenberg bought it and in 1940 fled Paris ahead of the Nazis. In 1941 the young Museum of Modern Art traded him two Cézannes and a Toulouse-Lautrec for it, paid for by the bequest of Lillie P. Bliss — a founder who died in 1931, never owned a Van Gogh, and wrote a will that let her pictures be sold to catch the next ones. It has hung in New York ever since — and now physicists queue in front of it too.",
      "facts": [
        {
          "claim": "Provenance: Theo van Gogh; his widow Jo van Gogh-Bonger; sold 1900 to Julien Leclercq; to Émile Schuffenecker 1901; repurchased by Jo; via Oldenzeel Gallery, Rotterdam, to Georgette P. van Stolk (1906–1938); to dealer Paul Rosenberg, who fled Nazi-occupied France to New York in 1940.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night"
        },
        {
          "claim": "MoMA acquired the painting in 1941 from Rosenberg by exchanging two Cézannes and a Toulouse-Lautrec; the credit line reads 'Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange)'.",
          "source": "https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802"
        },
        {
          "claim": "Lillie P. Bliss, one of MoMA's three female founders, died in 1931 two years after the museum opened; her bequest permitted works to be sold or exchanged to acquire new ones, which funded The Starry Night.",
          "source": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillie_P._Bliss"
        },
        {
          "claim": "In 2006, Aragón and colleagues showed the luminance fluctuations in Van Gogh's troubled-period paintings, including The Starry Night, match Kolmogorov's statistical theory of turbulence.",
          "source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0606246"
        },
        {
          "claim": "A 2024 study in Physics of Fluids analysed the painting's 14 swirls and found the -5/3 Kolmogorov power law of turbulence, plus Batchelor scaling in the brushstrokes.",
          "source": "https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article-abstract/36/9/095140/3312767/Hidden-turbulence-in-van-Gogh-s-The-Starry-Night"
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "quotes": [
    {
      "text": "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.",
      "who": "Vincent van Gogh, letter 777 to Theo, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, c. 31 May–6 June 1889",
      "where": "https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let777/letter.html"
    },
    {
      "text": "That doesn't stop me having a tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars.",
      "who": "Vincent van Gogh, letter 691 to Theo, Arles, c. 29 September 1888",
      "where": "https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let691/letter.html"
    },
    {
      "text": "Once again I'm allowing myself to do stars too big, &c., new setback, and I've enough of that.",
      "who": "Vincent van Gogh, letter 822 to Émile Bernard, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, c. 26 November 1889 — his own late verdict on the picture",
      "where": "https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let822/letter.html"
    }
  ]
}