Unlike most of his works, Starry Night was painted from memory rather than in the landscape.
The Starry Night is often considered Van Gogh's highlight. Unlike most of his works, Starry Night was painted from memory rather than in the landscape. The emphasis on inner, emotional life is clearly evident in his swirling, turbulent depiction of the sky - a radical departure from his earlier, more lifelike landscapes. Here Van Gogh followed a strict principle of structure and composition, in which the forms are distributed in precise arrangement across the canvas surface to create balance and tension amid the swirling torsion of the cypress trees and the night sky. The result is a landscape represented by curves and lines, its apparent chaos undermined by a rigorous formal arrangement. The spirituality that Van Gogh found in nature is impressively conveyed in Starry Night. The painting is famous for pushing painting beyond depicting the physical world.