South Korean study dates Van Gogh's Starry Night sky to a dawn on 22 July 1889

A date about a month later than assumed

A team of South Korean researchers reports in Scientific Reports, published on Thursday, 22 October, that the sky in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night matches a real dawn over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence on 22 July 1889. That is about a month later than the June date that art historians have long given the work. For more than a century the painting's sky was treated as a product of imagination, while the paper argues that its arrangement of celestial bodies was observed. At the time Van Gogh was living at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he had admitted himself after a series of mental health crises.

Why June was accepted

The June date rests on a letter to his brother Theo, numbered 782 and dated about 18 June 1889, in which Van Gogh described a new study of a starry sky. Earlier researchers offered two other dates: Albert Boime proposed 19 June in 1984, and Charles Whitney proposed 17 June in 1986, and the two could not both be right. The moon was the main obstacle to a June date. In mid-June the moon was waning gibbous, with about 63% of its visible face lit, while the painting shows a thin crescent. The team also re-read Theo's reply, and found that the drawings he received on 2 July did not include the copy of the painting that historians had assumed was sent, while the earlier letter mentions only the start of the work.

How the sky was rebuilt

The researchers simulated the night skies of 1889 as seen from the sanatorium window and tested each dawn against the painting. Only three dates qualified, when the moon sat above Venus and both fell inside the narrow frame, and 22 July was the closest match, with a thin crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster arranged as in the painting. They located a ridge southwest of the asylum and matched an earlier Van Gogh sketch to the real landscape, which showed he had drawn a surprisingly narrow slice of the scene. Kim, the study's first author, described the fieldwork in personal terms.

I was standing where Vincent had stood 130 years earlier.

Historical weather records point to clear skies around that date, and Van Gogh's letters mention cicadas, which the authors link to intense heat more compatible with July temperatures. Fanpage reports that the bell tower included in the painting was not visible from the window, which suggests the artist blended what he saw with memory and invention.

Caveats and reactions

The researchers acknowledge that their results are not conclusive, and that a coincidence cannot be ruled out. Kim told Trouw that the painting had drawn him in from the start, having first noticed that earlier studies identified the constellation Aries where he saw the Hyades in Taurus.

The Starry Night spoke to an astronomer like me.

The study is the work of Kim and co-authors from Kyung Hee University. The painting is currently held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, according to Fanpage.