Starry Night Redated: Astronomer Places Van Gogh's Sky at Dawn, July 22

SOUTHERN FRANCE — The question of when Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 has, according to a report by Futility Closet, received a fresh answer from an unexpected quarter: the heavens themselves.

Earlier studies, the report says, had set the work in mid-June, relying on a letter the artist wrote to his brother Theo around June 18. Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, a doctoral candidate at Kyung Hee University, observed that an onlooker in that period should have beheld a waning gibbous moon, not the crescent depicted on the canvas.

Intrigued, Mr. Kim compared astronomical simulations, weather records and van Gogh's other writings. His better estimate, the report states, is dawn on July 22, 1889. On that date, he holds, a crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades cluster in Taurus would have been visible from the painter's window, and the recorded hot weather would have stirred the cicadas the artist mentions in a letter.

Mr. Kim's article appears in the journal Scientific Reports. He told Popular Science that the conversation with van Gogh's other skies is ongoing, and that he and his colleagues plan to tell those stories one by one.

The report adds that Donald W. Olson, a "forensic astronomer" at Texas State University, has done similar work. He has estimated, for example, that Claude Monet's view of Le Havre harbor was taken from the artist's hotel room at 7:35 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1872.