Which artist painted The Starry Night?

Van Gogh, in June 1889, from a room in the asylum at Saint-Remy where he had admitted himself voluntarily after the incident with his ear. The view is roughly the one from his east-facing window before sunrise, with the village added - he wrote to his brother about seeing the morning star very large.

The painting is not a faithful record but it is not invented either. Astronomers have matched the moon phase and the bright object at the right to Venus as it appeared that month, and the composition places a cypress - traditionally a graveyard tree - between the viewer and the sky. He painted it from memory and imagination during the day, which he generally distrusted as a method and did anyway.

The swirls have attracted an unusual amount of scientific attention. Analyses of the luminance variations in the sky have found statistical patterns resembling turbulent flow, which is a genuinely hard thing to reproduce by intention, and one 2024 study compared the brushwork to atmospheric turbulence scaling laws. What that means is contested. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime, thought this canvas a failure, and it is now among the most reproduced images in existence.