The sky is real and the picture is not. Van Gogh's room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy faced east, and he wrote to his brother that through the iron bars of the window he could see an enclosed square of wheat. The bars are not in the painting. Neither is the village.
Out of the window, then out of the studio
He had admitted himself in May 1889, after Arles. The bedroom was upstairs and barred; the studio he was given was on the ground floor. He wrote about watching the country for a long time before sunrise with nothing in the sky but the morning star, which looked very big.
That is what the bright object to the right of the cypress is. Astronomers have checked the sky over Provence for the spring of 1889 and Venus was there before dawn, unusually bright. The picture is a night made in daylight, downstairs, out of a view he had been watching for weeks — he painted the same view twenty-one times in different weather, and this is the one with the invented sky.
The village is not there
Nothing with that spire stood in the valley below him. The village was added, worked up from a drawing made on a hillside above Saint-Rémy, and the cypresses are larger and closer than they were.
So the finished canvas holds a real sky, a real line of hills, an invented town, a tree moved forward and no bars on anything. Everything in it that can be checked against the nights of June 1889 is above the horizon, and everything below the horizon he made up.
The spire is the giveaway. It is the narrow steeple of the Netherlands he grew up in, and it is standing in a valley in Provence, where the church towers are square and broad and nothing like it. He had been in the south sixteen months by then. What he put under the stars was a village from a thousand kilometres north.
He filed it as a failure
In late November 1889 he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard that he had slaved away at nature all year and that once again he had let himself go reaching for stars that are too big — a new failure, and he had had enough of it.
He meant it, and the reason matters. He was in the middle of a long argument with Bernard and with Gauguin about whether a painter works in front of the thing or out of his own head, and he had come down hard on the side of the thing. By his own rule, a sky with an invented village under it was cheating, and cheating that had not even come off.
He was dead within the year. The canvas reached the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, where it hangs now, and nobody has agreed with him about it since.
He called it a failure and sent it off in a batch of studies. The bars are still not in it.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.