The Starry Night

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