In Don McLean's 1971 popular song "Vincent", which in its entirety is dedicated to the works and life of Van Gogh, he begins with the now almost universally recognized "Starry Starry Night". It is of course a testament to the importance and recognition of this individual work that Don McLean chooses to commence his song with the title of this work. It remains to the present among the worlds most beloved painting from Vincent Van Gogh, including being the most searched of his paintings on the internet, and it is by many considered his definitive piece of art.

As Don McLean also touches upon in his song, Van Gogh painted "Starry Night" while facing considerable struggling on accounts of his sanity. Vincent thus at the time of the painting had committed himself at the hospital at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, about thirty kilometres from Arles in France. This commitment came in the wake of the 23rd December 1888 episode in which Van Gogh sliced part of his own left ear. Due to this factor, Van Gogh did not have the chance to go out and look at new potential subjects for paintings very often, and he therefore often painted from memory or reinterpreted the paintings of others, like Millet. "The Starry Night" fits the first category.

The composition of the canvas can be isolated into three principal parts - the sky above, the village below and the cypress tree to the left somehow connecting the two. Vincent Van Gogh's night sky is here a raging inferno, as clouds are whirling across the sky, beholden with energy, while the clear orbs of the stars and the moon electricity up this scene. The way the clouds swirl and interact ensures that the viewer's eyes endlessly move around the painting, following the obvious movement within the painting. Below this field of energy, we find a bald contrast in the quiet village below, which offers some stability in the canvas. While often considered to be the village of Saint Remy, it is actually fictional, with church spires suggestive of Vincent Van Gogh's own native Netherlands. Tying the raging sky and the quiet village together, we find the large cypress tree in the left of the work. Vincent Van Gogh painted cypress trees on numerous occasions in his work and the special almost flaming shape of the tree gives it an ill-omened quality that serves well to join the two contrasting worlds in the painting. The identification of the artist himself with the cypress as a motive also enables us to place him in the role of the tree, stretching between the raving inferno of his mind, with all its light and inspiration, and the quieter and stable world below that he is also a part of.

"Starry Night" is a true artistic master piece by Van Gogh that offers both a view of a night sky and a window into the artist's soul. This work of the artist at the top of his craft inspired not only Don McLean but many others as well. Orchestral works, poems, tattoos and other deriving paintings all owe their inspiration to the magnificent starry night illustrated by Vincent Van Gogh in Saint Remy.