星夜

This is not the famous Starry Night. It is an earlier one, by Jean-Francois Millet, an artist far better known for his stooping peasants than for a night sky. He began it around 1850, not long after moving to the village of Barbizon south of Paris, and worked at it over years. Above a dim path and a cart on the horizon, meteors streak the dark. Millet's great admirer was Van Gogh, who copied his peasant scenes over and over and spoke of him almost as a saint. When Van Gogh painted his own Starry Night in 1889, he was working in a tradition Millet had helped shape, though there is no firm evidence he ever laid eyes on this particular picture. It hangs today at Yale.