Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh is a hugely symbolic painting which represented his feelings about the afterlife. He wrote to his brother Theo that he had a “tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion—so I go outside at night to paint the stars.”

On another occasion he wrote: “It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies. Hope is in the stars.”

He compares the stars to dots on a map and says that, just as one takes a train to travel on Earth, “we take death to reach a star.”

Despite these clear religious, spiritual intentions, he stated that Starry Night wasn’t a romantic or religious painting, but rather a reflection of his awe and inspiration for the beautiful night skies in Saint Remy and the surrounding landscape of Cyprus trees and the Alpille mountains. He composed the painting at night through the bars of his room in the asylum. While not completely from memory, he painted it during the day in the studio the asylum had provided for him. The scene is an amalgam of compositional elements. The village is based on a sketch of Saint-Rémy, the moon is stylised, the cypresses were objects of fascination to him and potent symbols of death. The brightest star is actually Venus, which he commented was prominent in the morning sky. It’s also likely that he was aware of popular illustrated publications of the night sky at that time, which depicted swirling spiral nebulae and whirlpool galaxies. These may have influenced him to paint those beautiful swirls in the sky.

And yet he considered the painting “a failure”, not even sending it on for sale, to save money on postage. He wrote: “When Gauguin was in Arles, … I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that.” Even his brother Theo thought the painting too stylised and urged him to focus on ‘the real sentiment of things.’

Van Gogh never got to see that his ‘failure’ would become of the greatest paintings ever made.