“This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” van Gogh wrote these lines to his brother Theo from the Saint-Paul asylum. He was describing his inspiration for creating The Starry Night, one of the most famous paintings in the world. To Van Gogh it represented observations gathered from his imagination, memories, and emotions. He gave the picture life through the rolling textures of short brushstrokes and thick pigments.

The night sky gave beauty and contrasts to the landscape; van Gogh once noted it was “must more alive and richly colored than the day.”