Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, painted in June 1889 from the window of his room in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is the most reproduced painting in the world and one of the most theologically resonant images in modern art. The painting depicts the pre-dawn sky over a Provençal village, with a turbulent night sky of swirling celestial bodies - eleven stars and a radiant moon - above a dark cypress tree that rises from the village foreground like a column of flame toward the wheeling heavens.
Van Gogh's biblical formation was deep and lifelong. He had grown up in the household of a Dutch Reformed minister, memorized large portions of Scripture as a child, and spent years in his twenties as a lay preacher and missionary worker before turning to painting. The biblical imagery that saturates his letters and paintings was not decorative allusion but the vocabulary of genuine theological formation.
The cypress is the painting's theological axis. In the ancient Mediterranean world, the cypress was the tree of death and eternity - it grew in cemeteries, its wood did not rot, its shape pointed upward. In van Gogh's letters, he described cypresses repeatedly as 'Egyptian obelisks,' structures that connect earth and heaven. The cypress of The Starry Night rises from the dark village into the celestial vortex, linking the mortal world of sleep and ordinary life to the cosmic drama above. Genesis 28:12 - Jacob's ladder dream, in which a stairway connects earth and heaven with angels ascending and descending - is the biblical image that the visual logic of the cypress most directly recalls: a vertical connector between the two realms.
The celestial drama above is even more explicitly biblical in its visual sources. Ezekiel 1:15-21 describes the prophet's vision of wheels within wheels, of living creatures surrounded by radiant rings, of the awesome throne chariot of God - the merkabah vision that was the most influential mystical text in ancient Jewish and early Christian spirituality. Van Gogh had read Ezekiel and had preached from the prophets during his Borinage period. The swirling, turbulent, wheel-like forms of the night sky in The Starry Night - the stars enclosed in halos of rotating light, the galaxy-like sweep of the background - are not meteorologically accurate (the painting was made from memory and imagination, not direct observation of the pre-dawn sky) but are structured like the wheeling heavenly forms of Ezekiel's vision.
Psalm 19:1 - 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands' - is the most direct biblical text for the painting's visual argument. The night sky is a theophany, a visible declaration of divine glory, and painting it with maximum visual intensity is an act of attention to that declaration. Van Gogh wrote to Theo from the asylum that he was attempting to paint 'a starry night with cypresses,' and the letters surrounding the painting's creation describe a condition of both extreme suffering (he was recovering from the most severe episode of his illness) and extreme visual intensity - the world was appearing to him with an almost unbearable sharpness of presence.
The village in the painting is not Saint-Rémy - the church spire is not Provençal but Dutch in its distinctive pointed form, evoking the churches of van Gogh's Brabant childhood. This interpolation of a Dutch church into a Provençal landscape is another of van Gogh's characteristic moves: the particularizing of the universal, the placement of the eternal in the local, the insistence that divine presence is not geographically restricted.
The painting was given by van Gogh to Theo and passed through several owners before entering the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. Its prominence in MoMA's permanent collection - displayed prominently in the Dutch-Flemish galleries - and its reproduction on posters, notebooks, coffee mugs, and phone cases worldwide has made it one of the most recognizable images in human history, a status that both reflects its visual power and has made it extraordinarily difficult to see freshly.
For further reading: Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh (1980); Cliff Edwards, Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest (1989); Naomi Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Knowledge in the Work of Vincent van Gogh (1998); Carol Zemel, Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art (1997); Albert J. Lubin, Stranger on the Earth: A Psychological Biography of Vincent van Gogh (1972).