Which Van Gogh painting features a night sky with swirling stars?

Which Van Gogh painting features a night sky with swirling stars? The answer is The Starry Night.

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 while staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The composition shows a dark village beneath a dramatic sky filled with luminous stars, a crescent moon, and sweeping, circular brushstrokes. A tall cypress tree rises in the foreground, visually linking the earth and heavens.

The view was based partly on the landscape outside Van Gogh’s asylum window, but the painting was not a straightforward nighttime copy. He painted it during the day and used artistic imagination and memory to reshape the scene. The village, for example, was largely invented rather than a literal depiction of Saint-Rémy.

A common mix-up is The Starry Night with Starry Night Over the Rhône, another Van Gogh painting featuring stars. The former is the famous swirling-sky image now held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art; the latter shows reflections of gaslights across the Rhône at night.