The Starry Night Trivia
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44 free The Starry Night trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 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 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The dark tree at the left of The Starry Night is often described as shaped like what?
A flame
A flame: the real trees stood far off beyond the field wall, but he pulled one up close, where it towers over the whole scene.
Q 02In which city has The Starry Night hung since 1941?
New York
New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1941 through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, and it has since become one of the most recognised paintings in Western art.
Q 03The church steeple in The Starry Night looks more like those of which country than those of France?
The Netherlands
The Netherlands, where he grew up as a pastor's son: the tall spire matches Dutch churches better than any he could see near the asylum.
Q 04How did Van Gogh come to enter the asylum in May 1889?
He admitted himself
He admitted himself: fearing a fresh attack, Van Gogh chose to go, and he stayed for a full year, painting whenever his health allowed.
Q 05Van Gogh told Theo he looked out from his asylum bedroom through what?
Iron bars
Iron bars, he wrote, yet what he dwelt on lay beyond them: an enclosed field, and each morning the sun rising over it in its glory.
Q 06With more than 30 rooms standing empty, what did the asylum give Van Gogh besides his bedroom in 1889?
A studio
A studio: the asylum was less than half full, so a spare ground-floor room became his workroom, and The Starry Night was made there.
Q 07Van Gogh could not paint in his bedroom, where he saw the night sky, so when did he paint The Starry Night?
During the day
During the day: a painter who preferred working from what lay in front of him had to make his night sky in daylight, away from the window that showed it.
Q 08What kind of paint did Van Gogh use for The Starry Night?
Oil paints
Oil paints, laid on so thickly that the strokes stand up from the canvas and set the whole sky in motion.
Q 09The brightest 'star' in The Starry Night, just right of the tall tree, is really which planet?
Venus
Venus: he told Theo he had watched the morning star looking very big before sunrise, and astronomers confirm it shone there that spring.
Q 10Which part of The Starry Night lay out of sight of Van Gogh's asylum window?
The village
The village was added from imagination: his window looked over a walled field to the hills, with no houses or church in sight.
Q 11How did Van Gogh describe The Starry Night in a letter to Émile Bernard in late 1889?
A failure
A failure, he told Bernard: he felt he had once again let himself paint stars that were too big, and said he had had enough of that.
Q 12A year before The Starry Night, Van Gogh told his sister the night seemed richer in what than the day?
Colour
Colour: he found the night more alive and more richly coloured than the day, the conviction behind the deep blues and glowing yellows he painted in 1889.
Q 13Which painter had lived with Van Gogh in Arles and argued for painting from imagination?
Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin stayed with him in Arles in late 1888 and worked from memory, and Van Gogh later blamed that pull toward abstraction for The Starry Night's oversized stars.
Q 21The whirling forms in the sky of The Starry Night match published astronomical drawings of what?
Nebulae
Nebulae: astronomy books of his day printed drawings of spiral ones seen through telescopes, which astronomers later recognised as whole galaxies beyond our own.
Q 22The tall dark tree in The Starry Night belongs to a kind long linked with what in Mediterranean culture?
Death
Death: such trees were planted in graveyards as symbols of mourning, and the one here has been read as a bridge between the earth and the sky.
Q 23The Starry Night was sent to Theo van Gogh in Paris, where he worked as what?
An art dealer
An art dealer: Theo worked for a Paris gallery firm, and his steady financial support let his brother devote himself entirely to painting.
Q 14How did Theo van Gogh react when The Starry Night reached him in Paris?
He had doubts about it
He had doubts about it: Theo wrote back that he understood the moonlit scene but felt the search for style took away the real sentiment of things.
Q 15Which 1888 Arles painting first set a patch of starry sky above a street scene?
Café Terrace at Night
Café Terrace at Night was painted on the spot in the dark, work he said he enormously enjoyed; Starry Night Over the Rhône followed the same month.
Q 16Which Paris museum holds Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted in Arles in 1888?
Musée d'Orsay
Musée d'Orsay holds the canvas today; Theo showed it at the 1889 Salon des Indépendants in Paris while his brother was in the asylum.
Q 17The Starry Night was painted in which region of France, where Van Gogh had moved in 1888?
Provence
Provence delighted him with its bright light and strong colours when he arrived in Arles in 1888, and he stayed in the region for just over two years.
Q 18Soon after reaching Arles, Van Gogh wrote that he needed 'a starry night with' what?
Cypresses
Cypresses still preoccupied him more than a year later at the asylum, where that June he gave the trees two canvases of their own.
Q 19Van Gogh wrote that dying takes us to a star as what takes us to Tarascon or Rouen?
A train
A train, he wrote in 1888: the stars made him dream the way the black dots for towns on a map did, each one a place you might somehow travel to.
Q 20LEGO's 2022 Starry Night set, made with MoMA, began as a design by whom?
A fan in Hong Kong
A fan in Hong Kong: Truman Cheng, a PhD student, put his brick version on LEGO's ideas platform, where it drew the 10,000 supporters a design needs to be reviewed.
Q 24Painting rain from the asylum window behind The Starry Night, Van Gogh borrowed his slanting strokes from which art?
Japanese prints
Japanese prints: two years earlier in Paris he had copied a Hiroshige print of a bridge in a downpour, and he drew the rain over the asylum field with slanting lines of the same kind.
Q 25When Van Gogh and his brother Theo died within months of each other, who took charge of The Starry Night?
His sister-in-law, Jo
His sister-in-law, Jo, inherited hundreds of unsold canvases in 1891 and spent decades lending, selling and promoting them until his name was made.
Q 26The window behind The Starry Night overlooked a walled field of what crop, painted by Van Gogh again and again?
Wheat
Wheat: he told Theo he could see a square of it in an enclosure, and he painted the field under bright summer sun and under dark storm clouds.
Q 27What killed Van Gogh in July 1890, a year after he painted The Starry Night?
A gunshot wound
A gunshot wound to the chest: he died two days later in his room at a small inn, with his brother Theo at his bedside.
Q 28Paul Rosenberg, who sold The Starry Night to MoMA, had fled what?
Occupied France
Occupied France: Rosenberg, a Jewish dealer in Paris, escaped to New York in 1940, and the Nazis seized works from the collection he had to leave behind.
Q 29In Starry Night Over the Rhône, what casts the long golden reflections across the water?
Gas street lamps
Gas street lamps in Arles: he set their harsh orange-gold glare against the pale sparkle of the stars above.
Q 30What did Lillie Bliss, whose bequest secured The Starry Night, do for MoMA in 1929?
Helped to found it
Helped to found it: Bliss was one of three women who set up the museum, and works from her bequest were later exchanged for The Starry Night.