The Starry Night

By Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh's Starry Night

Report By Mrs. Rennebohm Franz's Primary Multiage Class

Sunnyside School

Pullman, Washington, U.S.A., North America, Earth

March 27, l998

Our class has studied Van Gogh's painting, Starry Night. Here are our comments about the question:

Do the stars in this painting represent those you would see in a real sky?

Yes, we think that the stars in Van Gogh's painting do look like some stars in the sky. We did some research to decide this answer.

We looked in books with pictures of stars. This is what we found out:

In the book Stars by Seymour Simon (William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, l986), we found a picture of the Pleiades, an open cluster of stars.

This picture looks like Van Gogh's stars.

In the book Eyewitness The Visual Dictionary of the Universe (Dorling Kindersley, New York, l993),

we found a drawing of an overhead view of our galaxy, the Milky Way,

that looks like Van Gogh's stars.

And we found a drawing of a supernova,

(a dying supergiant star) that looks like his stars.

In the CD-ROM Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space (Dorling Kindersley, l996)

and the Universe, we also found pictures of a reflection nebula,

open star cluster of Pleiades,

and a supernova that looks like Van Gogh's stars.

When we look at the night sky without a telescope

the stars don't look like Van Gogh's stars,

unless it is a misty night with whisps of clouds in front of the stars.

Our classroom Art Docent, Mrs. Wohfeil, helped us learn about this painting.

(She is Samantha's Mom. Samantha is in our class.)

Our observations of Van Gogh's Starry Night are:

1. He mostly uses lots of brushstrokes.

2. He mixes colors.

3. He has both sky and ground.

4. The movement of his brushstrokes drags your eye to the brightest parts.

5. He uses round brushstrokes for the moon and stars.

6. He uses big brushstrokes.

7. He uses circular brushstrokes.

8. He uses small brushstrokes.

Here are two paintings from our class when we painted our own versions of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

The painting above was created by Jeff. He is a first grader in our class.

The painting above was created by Nick. Nick is a first grader in our class.

This is our star quilt. We make quilts to count our days of school. Each quilt has 25 patches. This is our 4th 25 patch "days of school quilt." Each day we put up a new quilt patch to count that day of school. The last square in this quilt marked our 100th day of school. We decided on a star quilt pattern because we were studying space!