In December 1888, after the breakdown in his 'Studio of the South' with Paul Gauguin in Arles — the cutting of his own ear — Vincent van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself in May 1889 to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The painting is the night version of the view he saw by day through his window, imagined in bed before falling asleep; he had sketched the same window in daylight many times.

The structure is honest: a long, slender cypress in the foreground, a sleeping town in the middle distance (with a Dutch church plugged in — the town is not actually visible from this angle), the Alpilles mountain range behind, and above, the streaming night sky. Sky, stars, and crescent flow in a turbulent fluidity, the brushstrokes moving in spirals and waves. Astrophysicists have shown these spirals to conform remarkably to the Kolmogorov laws of turbulence; but Van Gogh's only 'instrument' was a shaking hand and a young memory.

The thick, visible, almost sculptural use of the brushstroke (impasto) takes the Impressionist description of perception one step further: it is no longer light that is described but a mind surrounded by light. For this reason Van Gogh, alongside Cézanne and Gauguin, is called 'Post-Impressionist' — coming after Impressionism, but going somewhere else.

Van Gogh wrote that he disliked the painting; it contained 'too many stars'. A year later, at Auvers, he took his own life. The painting was bequeathed to MoMA in 1941, and is today probably the single most recognised image in the history of modern art.