Starry Night over Gettysburg

For three days, 1 to 3 July 1863, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia fought around a Pennsylvania crossroads town of about 2,400 people. When Lee withdrew on the fourth, some 50,000 men were dead, wounded, captured or missing, the largest toll of any battle ever fought on the continent. That November Lincoln came to dedicate a cemetery on Cemetery Hill and spoke for about two minutes. The town went back to sleep beneath the same sky.

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 from memory and from the window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy; it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its idea is a sky that moves. The stars spin, the moon burns, and a dark cypress rises the full height of the canvas to hold the whole turning thing to the ground.

The cypress becomes a monument: a stone column at the left with a lone soldier on top, black against the spirals. The stars are here in their halos of light, and the crescent moon in the upper right corner burns hottest of all. Below the sky the field runs out to a rail fence with cannon standing along it, then the town, three steeples, lamplit windows, and a line of blue hills. The eye climbs the column, rides the great central whorl across the sky, and comes down again at the moon.

Van Gogh painted this sky twenty-six years after the battle and an ocean away, but it belongs over this ground. Nothing about the place has been still since.