The Starry Night was first exhibited in 1890.
Although Vincent van Gogh painted the canvas in Saint-Rémy in June 1889, it did not immediately enter a public exhibition. The work was sent to his brother, Theo, in Paris later that year and was subsequently included in the seventh exhibition of Les XX, an avant-garde artists’ group in Brussels, in January 1890.
That date is easy to confuse with 1889, the year of the painting’s creation. It is also sometimes confused with van Gogh’s other night scenes, including Starry Night Over the Rhône, which had been exhibited earlier. The Brussels showing was one of the few important public presentations of The Starry Night during van Gogh’s lifetime; he died in July 1890.
The painting became far more famous after later exhibitions and its eventual acquisition by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Its first exhibition therefore belongs to the painting’s early history, not to the period when it became a modern-art icon.