In June 1889 Vincent van Gogh was living at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had asked to be taken in that May. From his bedroom window, which faced east, he could see a walled wheat field and, beyond it, the low hills of the Alpilles. He wrote to his brother Theo that he had watched the countryside from that window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big. The Starry Night grew out of that view, but it was not painted at the window, and not at night. He worked on it by day, in a room on the ground floor he was given as a studio, and he changed what he had seen. The village under the hills could not be seen from his room; he put it there, with a church spire that looks more like the north of the Netherlands than Provence. The cypress in front, dark and flickering like a flame, he brought close and made enormous, so it climbs past the hills and into the sky. And the sky is no night anyone could have looked at: a crescent moon wrapped in its own glow, stars swollen into halos, and through the middle a great rolling swirl, as if the wind had been made visible. The paint is thick and laid in short strokes that run beside one another, so the whole picture seems to move. Van Gogh did not think much of it. That November, in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard, he called it a failure, a reach for stars that were too big. He died the following July, in Auvers-sur-Oise, at thirty-seven. In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the painting, where it still hangs, one of the most familiar pictures in the world, and at 73.7 by 92.1 centimetres a good deal smaller than most people expect to find it when they finally get to stand right in front of it.