The comparison should not be seen as diminishing the brilliance of Starry Night, Bailey said. “He didn’t have the print with him but he obviously remembered it in great detail. He painted Starry Night in June, inspired by the the night sky he looked up at through the bars of his cell and the stunning Provence landscape with wheat fields, cypress trees and olive groves.īailey argues that Van Gogh was also inspired, possibly unconsciously, by his memories of The Great Wave. I think it was art which kept him sane and gave him a reason to live.” “I did research on the other patients in the asylum and they were all in a terrible state so it must have been very, very difficult for him to adjust his life. “It must have been horrific moving into a mental asylum in the 19th century,” said Bailey, author of the recent published Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. Van Gogh was well aware that he could not live independently without help. He was a voluntary patient, admitted after he cut off his ear and presented it, wrapped in paper, to a young woman in a local brothel. Starry Night was painted in the summer of 1889, when Van Gogh was in a small mental asylum on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. In one letter to his brother Theo, he said: the “These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.” He particularly admired the Hokusai print, which is now one of the most recognisable and reproduced artworks of all time. In the Van Gogh, “the swirling mass in the sky hurtles towards the more gentle slopes of Les Alpilles”.Īrt historians know that Van Gogh was a keen collector of Japanese prints. In the Hokusai the wave towers over the volcanic peak of Mount Fuji, Bailey said. Side by side, the similarities are obvious. Martin Bailey, a specialist on Vincent van Gogh, believes that the Dutch artist drew inspiration from Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa when he painted one of his most dazzling and celebrated works, The Starry Night.

One of the great masterpieces of 19th-century western art was loosely inspired by one of the greats of 19th-century Japanese art, it has been argued.

Starry night versions