Was Van Gogh a Christian? His Faith in 11 Paintings, and the Café Terrace “Last Supper”

1. 1853. Born on 30 March in Zundert, in the Netherlands, son of the Protestant minister Theodorus van Gogh.
2. 1876. Preaches his first sermon, in Richmond near London, on 29 October.
3. 1877–1878. Prepares for theology studies in Amsterdam, then gives them up.
4. 1879. Lay preacher in the Borinage, Belgium’s coal-mining district. The appointment is not renewed.
5. 1880. Decides to become an artist, convinced, the Van Gogh Museum says, “that he could also serve God as an artist”.
6. 1881. Quarrels with his father over going to church, and leaves home on Christmas Day.
7. 1885. His father dies in March. That autumn Vincent paints his father’s Bible.
8. 1888. In Arles he twice scrapes off a painting of Christ in Gethsemane, and paints Café Terrace at Night.
9. 1889–1890. In the asylum at Saint-Rémy he copies a Pietà, the Raising of Lazarus and the Good Samaritan.
10. 1890. Dies at Auvers-sur-Oise on 29 July, aged 37.

Yes. Vincent was born in 1853 in Zundert, a village in Brabant, to Anna Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister. By the 1880s his father was the pastor at Nuenen, and Vincent painted his church.

He made it early in 1884 as a present for his mother, who was laid up with a broken leg, and the Van Gogh Museum notes that “he was careful in his choice of subject: his father was the pastor at this church.” After his father died, Vincent reworked it in the autumn of 1885, painting out a farmer and adding the churchgoers, so that it now “bears a reference to his death.”

(Its later life was less devout. Thieves took it from the Van Gogh Museum in December 2002, and in 2016 Italian police found it in a Camorra member’s home at Castellammare di Stabia.)

But the LORD is in His holy temple; let all the earth be silent before Him.

Habakkuk 2:20 · BSB

Briefly, and with enormous enthusiasm. Working for the art dealers Goupil & Cie, he was transferred to Paris in 1875, “a period in which he became increasingly religious,” according to the Van Gogh Museum: “The letters he wrote to Theo at this time are full of Bible quotes and accounts of church services and sermons.” Goupil dismissed him in 1876. He found work at a school in Isleworth, outside London, whose clergyman owner let him preach “at the school and in the surrounding villages”. Richmond was his first sermon in a church, and he wrote it in English.

I am a stranger on the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me.

Psalm 119:19 · BSB

The sermon turns the verse into a picture of life as a journey: “It is an old faith and it is a good faith that our life is a pilgrims progress – that we are strangers in the earth, but that though this be so, yet we are not alone for our Father is with us.” Along the way he quotes the line that became his motto: “It is a good word, that of St Paul: As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing.” It comes from 2 Corinthians 6:10, and it turns up again and again in his letters of 1876 and 1877. Hold on to it.

Next he tried to become a minister properly, like his father. In 1877 he moved to Amsterdam to prepare for theology studies, with the whole family behind him. The Van Gogh Museum’s verdict is short: “Vincent lacked the discipline to study,” and in the end “his uncle the minister advised him to forget about his studies.”

He tried a shorter road. A training school for evangelists in Brussels did not appoint him (its biggest objection, his sister-in-law Jo later wrote, was “He is not submissive”), but in January 1879 he was given a six-month trial at Wasmes, in the Borinage, the coal-mining district of southern Belgium, for 50 francs a month.

He did not do it by halves. “He slept on the floor and gave away his possessions,” the Van Gogh Museum says. “His dedication was such that he was nicknamed ‘The Christ of the Coal Mine’.” Jo put the committee’s view more drily: “So much zeal was too much for the Committee, and a person who neglected himself so could not be an example to others.”

The committee’s own annual report, printed in French, is kinder and more revealing. It praises his care for the sick and injured, his devotion and his spirit of sacrifice, and records that he gave them the best part of his own clothes and linen. Had all that come with “le don de la parole”, the gift of speech, he would certainly have been an accomplished evangelist. It did not, and when the trial ended he was not kept on.

It is hard to read that today without smiling. The man let go for lacking the gift of speech left behind hundreds of letters, and they are still in print.

That depends on who you ask. His sister-in-law Jo, who later published his letters, believed the Borinage years were a “bitter struggle between doubt and religion” that “made him lose his former faith in God.” The Van Gogh Museum reads the same moment the other way: in 1880 he “became convinced that he could also serve God as an artist.”

His own letter to Theo that June sounds like a man moving God rather than losing him: “I’m always inclined to believe that the best way of knowing God is to love a great deal.” Look at the great artists, he said: “there will be God in it.” And “quite simply read the Bible, and the Gospels.” (The popular version, “the best way to know God is to love many things”, has drifted from an older translation, which reads “the best way of knowing God is to love many things.”)

The break came at the end of 1881, after a painful rejection in love, and he insisted it was with the church, not with God. A day or two before Christmas he wrote the lines that still surprise people: “Look, I find the clergymen’s God as dead as a doornail. But does that make me an atheist? The clergymen think me one – be that as it may – but look, I love, and how could I feel love if I myself weren’t alive and others weren’t alive?” What he could not fit into any system, he added, “for me it’s God or just as good as God.”

Then came Christmas. “Things actually came to a head because I didn’t go to church,” he told Theo. His father said “it would be better if I left home,” and Vincent left the same day, having told him that he “found the whole system of that religion loathsome.” Notice what went and what stayed. Out went the clergy, the system and his father’s “petty, academic way” with Scripture. The Bible stayed: “I also read the Bible sometimes, just as I sometimes read Michelet or Balzac or Eliot, but I see completely different things in the Bible than Pa sees.”

Eleven months later, in The Hague, he made a print of an old man sitting by his hearth, and explained to Theo what he had been trying to say. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for “the existence of a God and an eternity”, he wrote, is “the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that”. A little further on he added that “the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to.” In May 1890, in the asylum, he painted the figure again from his 1882 drawing. It is the picture above, now usually called At Eternity’s Gate.

The LORD is near to the brokenhearted; He saves the contrite in spirit.

Psalm 34:18 · BSB

Theodorus van Gogh died suddenly in March 1885. Coming home from a long walk, Jo wrote, “he fell down on the threshold of his home and was carried lifeless into the house.” That autumn Vincent painted the still life at the top of this page.

The Van Gogh Museum, which owns it, sums up the table: “This hefty Bible had belonged to Van Gogh’s father, a Protestant minister. Van Gogh painted it just after his father’s death. He placed his own copy of Émile Zola’s La joie de vivre next to it. That book was a kind of ‘bible’ for modern life. The books symbolize the different worldviews of Van Gogh and his father.” A father’s Bible and a son’s novel called The Joy of Living: the family argument, on one table.

Here is the odd part. When Vincent told Theo about the picture, he did not mention his father, the funeral or Zola. He described colors: “a still life of an open, hence an off-white Bible, bound in leather, against a black background with a yellow-brown foreground, with an additional note of lemon yellow.” He was proud he had painted it “in one go, in a single day.” The museum explains that the brothers had been debating whether black could work in a painting, and Vincent wanted to prove it could. Painters will be painters.

Writers on the painting report that the Bible lies open at Isaiah, with the chapter number painted as LIII: Isaiah 53, the suffering servant. Van Gogh never mentioned the page, so nobody can say whether he chose it.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

Isaiah 53:3 · BSB

The fullest answer is a letter he wrote from Arles on 26 June 1888 to the young painter Émile Bernard, who had taken up the Bible. It is not a churchgoer’s letter. Vincent calls much of the book “this so saddening Bible”, full of “pettiness and its contagious folly”, and says the study of Christ brings on an artist’s neurosis, made worse in his own case “by the seasoning of innumerable pipes”.

Then he reaches the center. The consolation of the Bible, “like a kernel inside a hard husk, a bitter pulp — is Christ.” Christ “alone — among all the philosophers, magicians, &c. declared eternal life – the endlessness of time, the non-existence of death – to be the principal certainty.” His highest praise is a painter’s praise: Christ “lived serenely as an artist greater than all artists — disdaining marble and clay and paint — working in living flesh,” and what he made was “living men, immortals.”

He singled out the parables (“What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig tree”), worth remembering when you look at his many sowers, among them The Sower with Setting Sun (1888). And he quoted Jesus to Bernard: “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

September 1888 produced two sentences that belong side by side. On the 3rd he told Theo: “In life and in painting too, I can easily do without the dear Lord, but I can’t, suffering as I do, do without something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.” At the end of the month, after defending a painting of his Yellow House that a friend had called horrible, he wrote the much-quoted line: “That doesn’t stop me having a tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars”. The starry painting in that second letter, its editors note, is the one above.

Within four weeks, then, he could do without “the dear Lord” and could not do without religion. Both were true for him, and that tension is the honest shape of his faith after 1881.

The version you usually see online (“a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars”) is a loose form of an older translation. Either way the meaning is the same. The need he could no longer bring to church, he took outside, under the sky.

He determines the number of the stars; He calls them each by name.

Psalm 147:4 · BSB

Van Gogh painted this café terrace on the Place du Forum in Arles in mid-September 1888, on the spot and in the dark. The Kröller-Müller Museum, which owns it, dates it to about 16 September and notes that its stars match the sky of 16 or 17 September 1888.

The claim. The theory comes from Jared Baxter, an American independent researcher, who presented it in 2013 in a paper at an academic conference in Brighton, calling the picture “a uniquely innovated Last Supper.” The press found it in March 2015, and it has circulated ever since. In Baxter’s reading, the long-haired waiter at the center is Christ, the lantern above him serves as a halo, there are twelve diners, a shadowy figure in the doorway is Judas going out into the night (John 13:30), and crosses are worked into the scene, one of them formed by the bars of a window behind the waiter. The twelfth diner, by Baxter’s own account, is mostly hidden: “The server eclipses all but the hand of the 12th diner.”

Twelve or thirteen? The Gospels are precise about who was at that table.

When evening came, Jesus was reclining with the twelve disciples.

Matthew 26:20 · BSB

That makes thirteen, and Baxter counts thirteen: twelve diners plus the waiter. After that the arithmetic gets slippery. Baxter’s own website counted the doorway figure as one of the twelve, later retellings add him as an extra, and a Dutch blog has eleven diners plus Judas. If you have heard it as “twelve people including Jesus”, that version is a disciple short even on the theory’s own terms. When a code’s own believers cannot agree on who the twelve are, the count depends on which dabs of paint you decide are people.

What Van Gogh said about it. He mentioned the picture in four letters that September and October. The fullest is to his sister Wil: “On the terrace, there are little figures of people drinking. A huge yellow lantern lights the terrace, the façade, the pavement, and even projects light over the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge.” What excited him was the color (“Now there’s a painting of night without black”) and a book: the scene, he said, was “something like the same subject” as the opening of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami, with its lighted cafés in Paris. None of the four letters mentions Christ, a supper, disciples or any religious meaning.

The halo letter. The strongest support in his own words comes from that 3 September letter, two weeks before the café terrace: “I’d like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colorations.” Baxter cites it, and it is real. Read whole, though, it points away from a code. The halo “used to be” the symbol; now he wanted color to carry the eternal, and he was talking about portraits (“The portrait conceived in this way…”). Looking for the eternal in ordinary faces is not the same as hiding Christ among café customers.

His own record on Last Suppers. Four years earlier, in 1884, a rich former goldsmith in Eindhoven was planning to paint his dining room, with a Last Supper among the panels. Van Gogh talked him into peasant scenes instead, telling him it “would do considerably more to whet the appetites of those who would have to sit at table there if scenes from the peasant life of the region were to be painted on the walls rather than mystical last suppers.” Baxter cites this letter too. On its face it shows a painter steering a patron away from a Last Supper toward people at work, the same move he would make with Gethsemane and the olive pickers.

The letter the theory leans on. In 2015 The Huffington Post reported that the “tremendous need for… religion” sentence was written “with direct reference to the painting.” It was not. That letter came about two weeks after the café was painted, it never names the café, and its starry painting is Starry Night Over the Rhône. Baxter himself had been more careful, calling the café only “the more likely reference”. The sentence continues: “I always dream a painting like that, with a group of lively figures of the pals.” On a plain reading, a painting he still dreams of is one he has not made yet.

The Gethsemane problem. That year Van Gogh did try to paint Christ, openly, and destroyed the results. In July he scraped off a Garden of Olives, he told Theo, “because I tell myself it’s wrong to do figures of that importance without a model.” On 21 September, five days after he described the café terrace to Theo, he wrote again: “For the second time I’ve scraped off a study of a Christ with the angel in the Garden of Olives. Because here I see real olive trees.” He added: “I can’t, or rather, I don’t wish, to paint it without models.” The theory needs him, in those same weeks, to have slipped a Christ into a café scene without telling anyone, while scraping off the Christ he painted openly. Baxter suggests he built the waiter’s face from prints after Rembrandt and Delacroix, and explained it all in a letter that has not survived: “I believe Vincent explained his intentions about Café Terrace in this missing letter.” A missing letter can support any theory, which is the trouble with it.

What the museums say. We found no public statement on the theory from the Kröller-Müller or from the Van Gogh Museum, and the Kröller-Müller’s own description of the painting is about color, gaslight and stars. The only museum reaction on record is one Baxter reported himself: a Van Gogh Museum curator, he wrote, told him it was “a very interesting theory but would be hard to prove as van Gogh never wrote about it in his letters.” Even artnet News, which ran the story, introduced it as “The latest Dan Brown-style conspiracy theory to hit the art world”.

So, is it baseless? Not entirely. It is built from real facts: Van Gogh knew the Bible well, wrote of a need for religion that very month, admired the Christs of Rembrandt and Delacroix, and did try to paint Jesus that year. As a claim about what Van Gogh hid, though, none of his letters supports it: not one says the café hides a Last Supper. It depends on counting brushstrokes that the painter himself called “little figures of people drinking.”

None of that stops a viewer from seeing light in darkness here. That is a response to the painting, not a code inside it, and it is why our library pairs the picture with John 1:5, as a match of theme rather than a claim about what Van Gogh meant.

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5 · BSB

In 1889 Van Gogh entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he stayed a year, and he painted the olive groves around it again and again. The Museum of Modern Art, which owns this one from June or July, calls it “a daylight partner” to “his more famous canvas, The Starry Night”.

That autumn Gauguin sent him a sketch of his own Christ in the Garden of Olives, and Bernard was painting Bible scenes too. Vincent called Bernard’s version “that nightmare of a Christ in the Garden of Olives”, and told Theo: “they’d driven me mad with their Christs in the garden, in which nothing is observed.” He would not paint “a Christ in the Garden of Olives, but in fact the olive picking as it’s still seen today, and then giving the correct proportions of the human figure in it, that would perhaps make people think of it all the same.” To Bernard he put it plainly: “in order to give an impression of anxiety, you can try to do it without heading straight for the historical garden of Gethsemane.”

The scholar Joan Greer called her study of these pictures “A modern Gethsemane”, arguing that he “considered the olive grove an appropriate subject for modern religious painting and turned to it with the story of Christ in mind.” Read that way, his olive groves are Gardens of Olives with the figure left out, and the viewer supplies the prayer.

Going a little farther, He fell facedown and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.”

Matthew 26:39 · BSB

The asylum years are where this story stops being funny. Van Gogh had attacks of illness there, and in September 1889 he noticed that they tended to take “an absurd religious turn.” Days later he wrote that, for all his “modern ideas”, “mixed-up, atrocious religious ideas come to me such as I never had in my head in the north.” He was “a little horrified by all religious exaggeration.” Yet in the same letter as the absurd religious turn he wrote: “I am not indifferent, and in the very suffering religious thoughts sometimes console me a great deal.”

The religious pictures he finished in that last year were copies of other painters’ work, made from prints. Two are Gospel scenes. The third, the Pietà, Mary holding her dead son, comes from Christian devotion rather than from any single verse.

Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889

During one of his attacks, his lithograph of Delacroix’s Pietà “had fallen into some oil and paint and got spoiled.” He was sad about it, he told Theo, and copied it in oil instead: first on a small canvas, a copy “which I think has feeling” (it is now in the Vatican Museums), then on the larger canvas above, which the editors of his letters say he made for his own bedroom. (The lithograph survives, “complete with stain,” the Van Gogh Museum notes.)

Viewers have long noticed that this Christ’s hair and beard are red, like Vincent’s. The scholar Joan Greer writes that “the redheaded Christ could easily be taken for a self-portrait, and often has been,” but that Van Gogh “did not comment on the physical resemblance between himself and the figure of Christ.” The Vatican Museums say the Christ in their small version is “in reality faithful to the model it is inspired by.” What Vincent did describe, to Wil, was Mary, with “a working woman’s good, solid hands.”

But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8 · BSB

The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt), 1890

In May 1890 Theo sent him some Rembrandt etchings, and Vincent painted part of The Raising of Lazarus. The Van Gogh Museum points out what is missing: “He left out the main figure: Christ with his arm raised. Van Gogh focused on the theme of human suffering. He probably identified with Lazarus in the tomb. That would explain why he gave the figure a red beard.”

His own description ends with “a yellow rising sun”, and he does not explain it. Greer notes his “tendency to use the sun to represent Christ”, which makes it tempting to read the light that wakes Lazarus as Christ after all. That reading is ours to make, not his to confirm.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25–26 · BSB

The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), 1890

His only comment on the finished picture is one sentence to Theo: “I’ve also attempted a copy of Delacroix’s Good Samaritan.” The Kröller-Müller Museum, which owns it, fills the silence. He painted it after “another serious breakdown”, and “perhaps he also alludes to his brother Theo, his own good Samaritan who is always there for him.”

But a Samaritan on a journey came upon him, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

Luke 10:33–34 · BSB

In May 1890 he left Saint-Rémy for Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, and in early June he painted the village church.

To Wil he described it entirely in color (“the building appears purplish against a sky of a deep and simple blue of pure cobalt”) and added that it was “again almost the same thing as the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the cemetery.” Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper doubts the building’s faith meant much to him by then, since he “had long ago abandoned organised Christianity.” Even so, the last church he painted took his mind back to his father’s parish.

Send out Your light and Your truth; let them lead me. Let them bring me to Your holy mountain and to the place where You dwell.

Psalm 43:3 · BSB

In July he painted wheatfields under storm skies. He told Theo and Jo that he had “made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness,” and, in the same breath, that the canvases would show “what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.” (Wheatfield with Crows is often called his last painting. The Van Gogh Museum calls that “just a persistent myth”: he made several more.)

Answer me quickly, O LORD; my spirit fails. Do not hide Your face from me, or I will be like those who descend to the Pit.

Psalm 143:7 · BSB

On 27 July 1890 he shot himself, and he died two days later, on 29 July, with Theo beside him. The Van Gogh Museum is clear that it was suicide: “Vincent himself stated that he had attempted to take his own life.” It calls the theory that schoolboys shot him, popularized by a 2011 biography, “entirely unfounded.” At his bedside, Theo told their sister Lies, Vincent said “La tristesse durera toujours”: the sadness will last forever.

The funeral was on 30 July. According to Bailey, the Catholic priest of Auvers, Henri Tessier, “refused to allow the funeral service to be held in his church, or to provide the parish hearse.” The printed notice in the Van Gogh Museum’s archive has the church crossed out. Émile Bernard described the coffin under a simple white cloth, surrounded by “the sunflowers that he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere.” At the grave Dr Gachet, who had cared for him in Auvers, could barely speak for crying: “He was, Gachet said, an honest man and a great artist, he had only two aims, humanity and art.” None of the accounts we found mentions a pastor or a religious service.

His last letters do not mention God. Six days after the funeral, though, Theo wrote to Lies that Vincent had always fought for his convictions, and he named them: “His love for his father, for the gospel, for the poor and the unhappy, for the great men of literature and painting, is enough proof for that.”

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, please talk to someone today. In the United States you can call 988 or text 988.

Put the whole record side by side and three things are true at once. He left the church and its clergy at 28, and by the end, as Bailey put it, he had long ago abandoned organized Christianity. He never stopped reaching for what he had left: he called Christ “an artist greater than all artists”, and in the same month that he said he could do without “the dear Lord” he confessed “a tremendous need for… religion”. And in his last weeks, as far as his letters show, he stopped writing about God at all.

Whether that adds up to a Christian depends on whether you are asking about his church, his creed or his heart. The first two can be read off the record. The third cannot, and Scripture is blunt about who can see it.

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7 · BSB

What the record does show is a man who kept looking for God in the places he could bear to look: in the poor, in the stars, in an old man by the fire, in a Delacroix Christ he painted with red hair. The Gospels have a promise for faith like that, bent and barely burning, and Matthew applies it to Jesus himself.

A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not extinguish, till He leads justice to victory.

Matthew 12:20 · BSB

The young preacher in Richmond had a motto for all this, and it was truer than he knew: sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. Van Gogh lived the first half of it in plain view. The second half belongs to the One who sees the heart.

If you would like to stay with one of these pictures a little longer, try Visio Divina, a way of praying with a painting and a Bible passage.

1. Look. Open The Olive Trees above and give it a full minute before you decide what it means.
2. Meditate. Read Matthew 26:36–39 slowly, then look again at a garden with no figure in it.
3. Pray. Tell God, in plain words, about the cup you would rather not drink.
4. Contemplate. Stay quiet for a few minutes with the painting in front of you.

Was Van Gogh a Christian?

He was raised one and for years wanted nothing more than to preach. From 1881 he rejected the church and its clergy, but he kept writing about God and about Christ. Whether he still counted as a Christian when he died is a judgment his letters leave open.

What religion was Van Gogh?

Protestant. His father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Vincent preached in Methodist and other Protestant settings in England and Belgium before he broke with organized religion in 1881.

Was Van Gogh a pastor or a preacher?

A preacher, never an ordained pastor. He preached his first sermon in Richmond, England, in 1876, and worked as a lay preacher among the coal miners of the Belgian Borinage in 1879. His father was the ordained minister.

Why did Van Gogh’s missionary work fail?

His committee praised his devotion and self-sacrifice but said he lacked “le don de la parole”, the gift of speech, and did not keep him on after his six-month trial in 1879. Jo van Gogh-Bonger added that his extreme self-neglect was “too much for the Committee”.

Did Van Gogh believe in God?

In his own way, and not steadily. In 1881, rejecting “the clergymen’s God”, he asked “But does that make me an atheist?” and answered that what he loved was, for him, “God or just as good as God.” In September 1888 he wrote, within four weeks, that he could “easily do without the dear Lord” and that he had “a tremendous need for… religion”.

Is there a hidden Last Supper in Café Terrace at Night?

Not as far as Van Gogh’s own words show. The idea comes from a 2013 conference paper by Jared Baxter and was widely reported in 2015. Van Gogh described the painting as a study of color at night, with “little figures of people drinking,” and never gave it a religious meaning. See the full discussion above.

Did Van Gogh paint Jesus?

He tried twice in 1888 to paint Christ in Gethsemane and scraped both off. The Christ he did finish is in a copy, his Pietà after Delacroix (1889), which he painted in two versions. In his Raising of Lazarus after Rembrandt (1890) he left Christ out.

Is The Starry Night a religious painting?

Van Gogh never called it one, and the Museum of Modern Art, which owns it, does not describe it as one. Some writers read faith into its church spire and its stars. We pair it with Psalm 8:3 in our gallery, as a match of theme.