Who painted 'The Starry Night'?

The Starry Night was painted by Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh painted the famous oil-on-canvas work in June 1889 while staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France. It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his room before sunrise, but the village in the foreground was largely imagined and based on sketches rather than copied directly from the visible landscape.

The painting’s swirling sky, bright stars and dark cypress tree became hallmarks of van Gogh’s expressive Post-Impressionist style. Astronomical research indicates that the unusually bright “star” near the cypress is Venus, which was visible in the morning sky at the time. The moon, however, is stylized rather than an exact record of its actual phase.

The Starry Night entered the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York in 1941. A common mix-up is The Starry Night Over the Rhône, another night scene van Gogh painted in Arles in 1888. That earlier painting has a different composition and setting.