Astronomers Say Van Gogh's Starry Night Was Painted on 22 July 1889

SAINT-RÉMY, FRANCE — A team of South Korean astronomers has concluded that the stars in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night match the real pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy, and that the canvas was most likely painted on 22 July 1889, according to a report in The Debrief.

Art historians, the report says, have usually dated the work by a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around 18 June 1889. Astronomers have long objected that the waning gibbous moon of that period does not agree with the slender crescent in the painting. Studies in 1984 and 1986 proposed differing dates, and the researchers said neither displaced the prevailing religious and symbolic readings of the work.

The new study comes from SLLAB, a South Korean space-science company, and Kyung Hee University's School of Space Research. Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the company's chief executive and first author, says the central cluster is the Hyades in Taurus, not Aries as earlier work had suggested. The team suspected a date on which the Hyades rose in the east beside Venus.

That date had been set aside because historians placed it within one of the painter's seizures. The team reports that it studied weather records and remarks about cicadas in the original French and Dutch letters, and concluded that the seizure began in late July. It also made two field trips to France, visiting the exact spot at Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh sketched the landscape.

Using a Procrustes shape analysis, the team says the five central stars matched the Hyades, and matched even more closely a pen drawing Van Gogh made after the painting. The authors take this as indication that the sky was based on observation rather than pure imagination.

Kim hopes for a "renewed, multidisciplinary look" at the Saint-Rémy paintings. The team suggests that the stars in Café Terrace at Night may be the Summer Triangle, and says it plans to tell the stories of the artist's other skies one by one.