A lonely Van Gogh painted postman Joseph Roulin and his family in a creative frenzy. The portraits, on view at MFA Boston, reveal a wildly immediate inner life.

Van Gogh painted “Starry Night” when he was 36 — in June 1889, near the end of his life, which ended in suicide a year later.

The famous painting from Dutch post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh has sparked controversy among physicists. Two decades ago, a pair of physicists stood in a museum in Madrid contemplating the ...