Noche estrellada

This is not the famous Van Gogh. It is Edvard Munch's night, painted in 1893, and it looks out over Asgardstrand, a small beach resort south of Oslo where he had been spending his summers. The same year he was deep in the cycle he called the Frieze of Life, the run of work that includes The Scream, and this quiet coastline belongs to that emotional world. Munch said he wanted to paint the feeling the night called up in him rather than record the view, so the blue does the work of mood, heavy and full of foreboding. Astronomers have even matched the sky to real evenings that August, with Jupiter and the Pleiades rising. He first showed it in Berlin that December under a German title, Die Sterne, the stars.