Astronomers Match Van Gogh's Starry Night to a Real Dawn Sky in July

The swirling sky in Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" may be a real view after all. A new study suggests it shows the pre-dawn sky seen from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence around July 22, 1889, with a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster, Space.com reported.

That date is about a month later than the one most art historians have long assumed for the painting.

What did the researchers find?

A team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim of Kyung Hee University and the South Korean telescope company SLLAB concluded that the stars, moon and Venus in the painting line up with the real sky near dawn on July 22, 1889. The work was published Oct. 22 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Earlier attempts to pin down the sky began in 1984 with art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell at UCLA, and later involved astronomer Charles Whitney at Harvard University. Their analyses did not agree with one another, so no consensus emerged.

How did they work it out?

The team reconstructed the historical night sky from the spot in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh is said to have painted. They then used a method called Procrustes analysis, which compares only the shape of two sets of points after matching their position, size and rotation. Kim told Space.com this suited the task because a star cluster on a canvas may be drawn larger, smaller or slightly tilted compared with reality.

Shape alone was not enough, Kim explained, since different constellations could fit about equally well. So the researchers also checked whether the stars were really in that part of the pre-dawn sky on that date, whether they fall within the painter's field of view, and whether the moon and Venus look as they do in the painting. According to Kim, only the Hyades satisfied all of those conditions.

Why does the July date matter?

Art historians have generally thought Van Gogh painted the work in June. Some leading historians also see it as stylistically different from his other works from that month, which the researchers cite in their paper. The team argues that the July match could support the idea that the painting was finished later than assumed.

Kim's proposal is that Van Gogh may have conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22.

What do Van Gogh's letters say?

Van Gogh wrote about wanting to paint a starry sky well before 1889. In a letter dated April 12, 1888, he compared the challenge to painting a green meadow dotted with dandelions in daylight. Kim also pointed to a letter from between late May and early June 1889, in which Van Gogh described seeing the countryside from his window long before sunrise, with only the morning star visible.

Kim suggested these records could mean the artist watched the pre-dawn sky repeatedly, which might have led to him seeing the sky of July 22. Kim acknowledged that linking the letters to the painting's timeline draws on personal imagination, so the work does not definitively change the painting's history.

Does this settle the date?

No. The study shows that the painted sky matches the real one around July 22 in both observation and shape, but it does not show when Van Gogh actually picked up the brush. Kim said further research in art history and conservation science could shed more light on the question.

What does this mean for readers?

For anyone who has looked at one of the world's best-known paintings, the study offers a new way to see it: not purely as imagination, but possibly as a record of a real dawn that Van Gogh saw. Whether museums and art historians change how they date the work will depend on that further research.

Around Prague, based on reporting by Space.com