During May 1889, about six months after supposedly threatening Paul Gauguin with a razor and definitely slicing off part of his left ear, Vincent van Gogh realized his mental illness and anxiety were getting absolutely out of hand and got admitted himself voluntarily into Saint-Paul asylum, in the south of France. During the year that he spent there, the new environment of the clinic replaced Arles as his source of inspiration. It was a period of profuse output.
The oil on canvas above (74 by 92cm) was supposedly painted from memory, after van Gogh had spent the whole night awake looking out his window. Some experts say such a village and the "flaming" cypress tree were not visible from his room. To me that clear and seductive whirl extending through the center, giving the painting a sense of movement and incessant renovation and guiding our eyes, always looks like the Milky Way. The moon was probably close to full when he painted it and the identity of most of the celestial bodies is indecipherable. The one thing "real" and attested about the painting is the "star" with the large white glow near the horizon. The Dutch artist wrote to his brother Theo around the same time that one day, before sunrise, he could see "nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". It's Venus. You can see it in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.
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