Van Gogh's night of many blues

Blue dominates The Starry Night, but it is never one blue. Step outside on a clear night and the sky is nearly colorless, a dark near-neutral. Van Gogh's is the opposite: a sky of saturated blue, built across a wide range of values and temperatures, that somehow reads as more like night than a faithful copy would. That is the lesson hiding in the palette. He did not record the color of the night, he constructed one, and because the whole sky is a built set of relationships, every choice in it is one you can study and use.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889 — Vincent van Gogh, *The Starry Night*, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Public Domain.

Proportional color palette of The Starry Night, more than half blue in many shifts, with a small fraction of yellow — Proportional palette Every color in the painting, each block sized to how much of the canvas it covers. More than half the canvas is blue, and the yellow of the stars is a tiny fraction.

The stars and the blue need each other

The yellow of the stars is barely there, a thin slice of the palette, and that is the point. A small note glows when it is surrounded by a large field of its opposite, and here the opposite is almost the whole canvas. Blue and yellow pull against each other, the blue going cooler and deeper, the yellow hotter, but it is the sheer amount of blue around each star that makes it burn. The stars do not shine on their own; the blue is what makes them burn. If a light in your own painting feels weak, the fix is rarely a brighter paint; it is a larger field of its opposite around it.

Every stroke its own color

Look closely and Van Gogh almost never lays a blue down flat. He breaks it, setting a cobalt against an ultramarine against a slate, and he lets each stroke follow the curl of the sky, so the color and the drawing happen in one gesture. That is what separates this from a flat field, or from the even dots of pointillism: the broken color rides the motion of the brush. Step back and the surface seems to turn. When you work this way, resist premixing. Set related colors side by side and let the eye fuse them.

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Common questions

What paints did Van Gogh use in The Starry Night?

Mostly cobalt blue and ultramarine for the sky, chrome yellow and zinc white for the stars and moon, and Prussian blue mixed with greens for the cypress. The blue family does most of the work, and the warm yellows are reserved for the points of light.

Did Van Gogh paint The Starry Night from life?

He painted it from his room at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Remy in June 1889, working partly from what he saw outside and partly from memory.

Where can I see The Starry Night?

It is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting dates to 1889 and is in the public domain.