[6][7] In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear,[8][9] Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889.

[10][11] Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived,[12] allowing him to occupy not only a second-story bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as a painting studio.

[14] During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the Irises from May 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait from September 1889, in the Musée d'Orsay.

"Through the iron-barred window", he wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed square of wheat ... above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory.

While the hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able there to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper; eventually, he would base newer variations on previous versions.

The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains.

Van Gogh exaggerated their size in six of these paintings, most notably in F717 Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees closer to the picture plane.

[32] Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight [The Starry Night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things.

"[33] But although Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them[34] and continued with his preferred method of painting from nature.

"[44] Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood.

"[45] Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content"[45] of the work refers to the New Testament Book of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon.

"[46] (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in Landscape with Olive Trees,[47] painted at the same time and often regarded as a pendant to The Starry Night.

)[48] Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" that "was conceived in a state of great agitation.

[51] He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity.

"[52] Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision[53] and advances his symbolist theory concerning the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament Book of Genesis.

[54] Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries.

[22] He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne as a possible inspiration for his belief in an afterlife on stars or planets.

Boime interprets the swirling figure in the central portion of the sky in The Starry Night to represent either a spiral galaxy or a comet, photographs of which had also been published in popular media.

[15] He also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy in the sky, although he gives credit for the original to Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, whose work Flammarion reproduced.

[67] Whitney also theorizes that the swirls in the sky could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty-seven months he spent in Provence.

Cypress trees have long been associated with death in European culture, though the question of whether Van Gogh intended for them to have such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is the subject of an open debate.

In an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred to "funereal cypresses,"[70] though this is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows."

"[63] Art historian Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Van Gogh the cypresses "function as rustic and natural obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth.

Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgam of images.

What the three pictures do have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style [that] takes away the real sentiment of things" in The Starry Night.

On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term.

In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens.

And to Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour so naively distinguished.

[68] Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of this breakdown were present when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, that in giving himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached.