. . .
“The Starry Night” was not, as were most of Van Gogh’s paintings, the contemplation of a landscape or the image of a fleeting moment. “The Starry Night” was the result of a deliberate detachment from reality, and the entrance into the realm of imagination. It is then, perhaps not difficult to believe that “The Starry Night” is the portrait of a dream: as in a dream, ingredients from different places find their way into a scenario where they are all supposed to have a meaning, but which without deep analysis becomes impossible to know. The giant cypress planted in the foreground beneath an explosive sky that defies our sense of rationality; even that little town that hides among hills betrays the picture of Saint-Rémy, as it was supposed to be, but wants to be the memory of a Dutch past (Pickvance 103). However, this is a dream that we can learn to interpret with some little help from Freud: “…a dream can represent a wish as fulfilled” (310). “The Starry Night” was maybe Vincent’s most haunting dream: the wish to accomplish “that vertical movement from the earth into the heavens that his most explosive pictures seem to promise, bursting up into the blue” (Callow xviii). “The Starry Night” was Vincent Van Gogh’s dream for a new self.

“Why, I say to myself, should the shinning dots of the sky be less accessible than the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star” (qtd. in Callow 257). Vincent desired a new self to free his spirit from the existence that he found unbearable, and he saw a way of doing this in the stars, in the heavens. “The Starry Night” was an attempt to wish, maybe in a moment of sanity, for a movement into the heavens, for the elevation of the spirit from the imprisonment of his mind. An elevation that Van Gogh saw as the only possible way to be again the master of his mind. Death was the way that Van Gogh saw could accomplish this, and by materializing death in this picture as a cypress consuming like fire or a choleric nebula he verbalized as well his choleric and uncontrolled mind and his consuming spirit.

And perhaps with some luck we would also be right by saying not only the stars, but the figure of a sun that Vincent regarded as God. “Victor Hugo says, God is an occulting lighthouse” (Van Gogh Letter 534). Was Van Gogh also looking for a God, for religion? Maybe he was, maybe it was a part of his search for the liberation of his incarcerated spirit. Or maybe its just our desperate attempts to proceed into further alien visions. What we must not forget is that all the process that we have assiduously undertaken in the understanding of this painting is still just one way of understanding, it is one attempt, however elaborate it may be, to reach the truth underlying Van Gogh’s mind. We cannot with certainty reach a final conclusion and claim that we have understood the painting as it was conceived: the truth will always be in Van Gogh’s mind, and he is the one that can claim such statement. So then, what is the raison d’etre of “The Starry Night”? I would say Vincent Van Gogh’s wish to free his spirit from a life that was unbearable. But that of course is just my interpretation of a magnificent artwork by a sublime creator.

Callow, Philip. “Chapter 12: Asylum.” Vincent Van Gogh, A life. Ed. Ivan R. Dee, Inc. Chicago, 1990. 239-262.

Freud, Sigmund. “From The interpretation of Dreams.” A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1998. 309-316.

Pickvance, Ronald. Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. Ed. Emily Walter. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986. 103-107.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Letters 593, 594, 595 and 596. The Complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Volume three. Ed. Bullfinch Press. Toronto. 1991. 176-186.

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