Starry Night

Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by Jean-François Millet completed in 1850 and retouched in 1865. One of Millet's few painting that is exclusively a landscape, it is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven. History In 1849, Millet left Paris, a city that he had lived in for almost a decade. He moved to Barbizon, a small village on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest in the northern part of the center of France, due to a cholera outbreak and political and social unrest caused by the Revolutions of 1848. However, it was not until after his death in 1875 when it appeared on the markets. It first appeared in Hôtel Drouot, a famous auction house in Paris, on May 10-11, 1875. It later surfaced again in Galerie Goupil, a leading art dealership in France in the 19th century that specialized in auctioning off paintings and sculptures. From 1878 onwards, it was in the possession of George Lillie Craik and his descendants. Craik was a Scottish writer and literary critic who lived in London at the time of this acquisition. The painting was passed throughout his family, eventually ending up with J.S. Knapp Fisher. From him, it was purchased by the Yale University Art Gallery through the use of the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913 fund. It is now in their permanent collection. Composition One of Millet's students, Edward Wheelwright, wrote that, according to Millet, "Every landscape, however small, should contain the possibility of being indefinitely extended on either side; every glimpse of the horizon should be felt to be a segment of the great circle that bounds out vision...". Millet executed Starry Night with this philosophy in mind. He did so over the span of two years, painting a darkened path lit up by a star-filled night sky. In the foreground, there is a dark, almost black expanse of grass and dirt. The middle ground is complete with some dark green trees and shrubs and the remainder of the canvas shows a sky showered with stars and different hues of green and blue. There is a horizon near the center of the canvas, shown through a light green pigment that blends away into a darker blue color. The silhouette of a cart is in this horizon, contrasting sharply from the rest of the lighter colors in the sky.