Which artist created the famous painting "The Starry Night"?

The artist who created the famous painting “The Starry Night” was Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh painted the oil-on-canvas work in June 1889 while staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. The swirling sky was inspired by the view from his east-facing bedroom window before sunrise, while the village below was largely imagined rather than copied directly from the landscape.

The painting reflects Van Gogh’s bold Post-Impressionist style, with energetic brushstrokes, intense blues and yellows, a tall cypress tree, and luminous stars. The bright object near the cypress is generally identified as Venus, which was visible in the morning sky at the time. The moon, however, is artistically stylized rather than astronomically exact.

A common mix-up is “Starry Night Over the Rhône,” another night scene painted by Van Gogh in 1888. The better-known “The Starry Night” is now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which acquired it in 1941.