Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free The Starry Night trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Starry Night trivia quiz is devoted to a single canvas: the view from Vincent van Gogh's east-facing asylum window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, painted in June 1889 and now the most famous picture in New York's Museum of Modern Art. The easy questions are the ones every gallery-goer half knows: the year, the artist, the museum, the swirling sky. From there it goes into the details that surprise people. Van Gogh painted it by day in a ground-floor studio, not by night from his bed. The brightest star is Venus. The moon is the wrong phase. The village was never visible from the window. And the painter himself called it a failure. The second half follows the painting out of the asylum: through Theo's widow Jo, a poet, a friend of Gauguin, a Rotterdam collector and a Paris dealer fleeing the Nazis, to a 1941 exchange with MoMA. It also covers the pigments the sky was painted with, the art historians who read galaxies, wind and the Book of Revelation into the sky, the earlier nocturnes at Arles, and the Don McLean song written on a paper bag. For the painter's whole life, see our separate Van Gogh quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on The Starry Night and its related paintings, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Forty-six questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year did Van Gogh paint The Starry Night?
1889
He wrote to Paris around 18 June to say he had a new study of a starry sky.
Q 02Where has The Starry Night hung since 1941?
Museum of Modern Art, New York
It came through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and is rarely loaned out.
Q 03The Starry Night shows the view from Van Gogh's room in what kind of institution?
A mental asylum
Saint-Paul-de-Mausole occupied a former monastery near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Q 04On what date did Van Gogh voluntarily admit himself to the asylum?
8 May 1889
It followed the December breakdown in which he mutilated his own left ear.
Q 05Which direction did the asylum window in the painting face?
East
That is why the light before sunrise and the morning star appear; the sun rose over the enclosed wheat field.
Q 06Why did the asylum let Van Gogh have both a bedroom and a separate studio?
It was less than half full
The institution catered to the wealthy, so a second-floor bedroom and a ground-floor studio were both free.
Q 07Where was The Starry Night actually painted?
In his ground-floor studio by day
Staff would not let him paint in his bedroom, so he sketched there and worked from the studies downstairs.
Q 08How many times did Van Gogh paint variations of the view from that window?
No fewer than 21
He showed it at sunrise, moonrise, in sunshine, cloud, wind and once in rain; The Starry Night is the only nocturne.
Q 09The brightest 'star' in the painting, just right of the cypress, is which planet?
Venus
Astronomers confirmed the morning star was visible at dawn in Provence in spring 1889 and nearly as bright as it gets.
Q 10What was the actual phase of the moon when Van Gogh painted his crescent?
Waning gibbous
One historian thinks he began with a gibbous moon and reverted to a crescent, leaving the bright aureole behind.
Q 11Which element of the painting could not be seen from Van Gogh's window?
The village
It came from a sketch made on a hillside above Saint-Rémy, and its steeple looks more Dutch than Provençal.
Q 12Which mountains form the diagonal line of low hills across the paintings of the view?
The Alpilles
The line coming in from the right unites all twenty-one versions of the scene.
Q 13How did Van Gogh describe The Starry Night in a letter to Émile Bernard in late 1889?
A failure
He said he had let himself be led astray into 'reaching for stars that are too big'.
Q 21Van Gogh compared the stars to dots on a map and said we take what 'to reach a star'?
Death
Just as one takes a train to travel on Earth, he wrote; he retained a belief in an afterlife despite rejecting religion.
Q 22Which book of the Bible did Meyer Schapiro link to the painting's hidden content?
Revelation
He saw the apocalyptic woman girded with sun and moon and crowned with stars; Loevgren preferred Joseph's dream in Genesis.
Q 23Which constellation did Albert Boime identify in the sky of The Starry Night?
Aries
Harvard astronomer Charles Whitney agreed about the morning star but was less sure about the constellation.
Q 14What did Van Gogh call the painting when listing works to send Theo in September 1889?
A night study
He then held it back with two others to save on postage; it went to Paris on 28 September.
Q 15Which painter had lived with Van Gogh in Arles and argued for painting from imagination?
Paul Gauguin
Van Gogh preferred painting from nature and blamed 'abstraction' for leading him astray in the sky's swirls.
Q 16How did Theo describe The Starry Night in a letter of October 1889?
The village in the moonlight
He worried that his brother's 'search for style takes away the real sentiment of things'.
Q 17Which was the first painting in Van Gogh's series of nocturnes, done in Arles in 1888?
Café Terrace at Night
It was followed later the same September by Starry Night Over the Rhône.
Q 18Which Paris museum holds Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted in Arles in 1888?
Musée d'Orsay
It was first shown at the 1889 Salon des Indépendants, painted a short walk from the Yellow House.
Q 19Which Netherlands museum holds the 1888 Place du Forum nocturne Café Terrace at Night?
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The café on the Place du Forum was refurbished in 1990-91 to look like the painting.
Q 20Soon after reaching Arles, Van Gogh wrote that he needed 'a starry night with' what?
Cypresses
Or, he added, perhaps a starry night above a field of ripe wheat.
Q 24Boime suggested the swirl in the sky represents what, seen in popular astronomy books?
A spiral galaxy or comet
Camille Flammarion's publications reproduced drawings of 'spiral nebulae' by Lord Rosse.
Q 25Charles Whitney suggested the swirls could represent which local wind?
The mistral
The wind triggered Van Gogh's first breakdown in the asylum, less than a month after the painting.
Q 26Cypress trees are traditionally associated with what in Mediterranean culture?
Death
Van Gogh's letters suggest he cared more about the trees' bottle-green form than any symbolism.
Q 27Which two pigments were used for the sky of The Starry Night?
Ultramarine and cobalt blue
Scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and MoMA analysed the paint.
Q 28Which rare pigment did Van Gogh use for the stars and moon?
Indian yellow
It was combined with zinc yellow.
Q 29Who inherited The Starry Night when the painter died in 1890?
His brother Theo
Theo died less than six months later, and his widow Jo became caretaker of the whole legacy.
Q 30To whom did Jo van Gogh-Bonger sell The Starry Night in Paris in 1900?
The poet Julien Leclercq
Leclercq sold it to Gauguin's friend Schuffenecker in 1901, and Jo later bought it back.