The Starry Night is an oil on canvas painting by Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, The Starry Night is one of the most recognized paintings in Western art, done a year before his death. The Starry Night is the only nocturne in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". Researchers have determined that Venus was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in the spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly as bright as possible. So brightest "star" in the painting, just to viewer's right of the cypress tree, is actually Venus. Starry Night (September 1888, French: La Nuit étoilée), commonly known as Starry Night Over the Rhône, is one of Vincent van Gogh's paintings of Arles at night. It was painted on the bank of the Rhône that was only a one or two-minute walk from the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine, which Van Gogh was renting at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night provided the subject for some of van Gogh's more famous paintings, including Café Terrace at Night (painted earlier the same month) and the June, 1889, canvas from Saint-Remy, The Starry Night. A sketch of the painting is included in a letter van Gogh sent to his friend Eugène Boch on 2 October, 1888. Starry Night, which is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, was first exhibited in 1889 at Paris' annual exhibition of Société des Artistes Indépendants. It was shown together with van Gogh's Irises, which was added by Vincent's brother, Theo, although Vincent had proposed including one of his paintings from public gardens in Arles.