Eiffel Tower may have inspired Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, says expert

‘Pyrotechnical music of the stars, sky and clouds’: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Photograph: Alamy

Art experts have long struggled to explain the inspiration behind Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, in which towering cypress trees are depicted against a swirling night sky over a hillside village. Created during his incarceration in an asylum near Saint-Rémy in the south of France, it is one of a series of paintings of cypress trees interpreted as an exploration of abstraction or a mystical evocation of nature.

Now the art historian Prof James Hall, a former Guardian art critic, has a new theory to explain Van Gogh’s fascination with these colossal evergreens: the Eiffel Tower.