5:30 p.m. Hear the crowd before I see it. Doors to the fifth-floor collection slide open, and the gallery sounds like Penn Station. With the fourth and sixth floors closed, the crowds in here are bigger than I’ve ever seen — and “Starry Night” has a semicircle of 50, 60 people in front of it.

5:31 p.m. Station myself in the back of the throng. Back here “Starry Night” (which measures about three feet by two-and-a-half) appears a bit larger than postcard scale. Neighbors murmur in French and Turkish. I’m tall enough to see over most heads; the raised smartphones, however, are a killer.

5:33 p.m. Push forward: excuse me, excuse me! Now I can see the brush work properly; the blues of the night sky stutter like Morse code, and the black outline of the church steeple pierces the distant hills. Try to let the picture, so overloaded with clichés of madness and vision, dissolve into pure form. Shoved by woman with GoPro.