The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh, Saint-Rémy 1889

Painted in June 1889 at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, this is the canvas that made the night sky a living thing — the swirling cypresses and stars and moon working together above a sleeping village. Van Gogh saw it, as he wrote, as a night study rather than a finished statement, but it has become one of the defining works of Western painting. Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The postcard brings that intensity to a hand-held format — for a letter, a desk, or a Van Gogh night collection. From the Vincent van Gogh collection.