Starry Night, one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings, is not housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Instead, it is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. The reason for this is rooted in the history of the painting’s ownership.
Van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889 while he was staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. After his death in 1890, the painting was inherited by his brother Theo van Gogh. Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, later sold the painting to art dealer Julien Leclercq in 1900. Over the years, the painting changed hands several times before it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1941.
The Van Gogh Museum, which opened in 1973, primarily houses works that were owned by Vincent’s family or were part of his personal collection. Since Starry Night had already been sold and was in private collections before the museum was established, it never became part of the museum’s collection.
In summary, Starry Night is not in the Van Gogh Museum because it was sold by Van Gogh’s family long before the museum was created, and it eventually found its way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.