Researchers have suggested that Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, long believed to depict a largely imagined sky, could have been inspired by an actual celestial arrangement witnessed in southern France in July 1889. One of the world’s most recognisable paintings may have more to do with astronomy than imagination.
The findings challenge the widely accepted belief that the Dutch painter created the work in June 1889, while staying at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, according to The Guardian .
A South Korean research team examined the positions of the crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster, concluding that their arrangement closely resembled the sky before sunrise on 22 July 1889. Using astronomy software, the researchers reconstructed the morning skies of June and July 1889. Of those, 22 July offered the closest overall match. It told The Guardian that documentary evidence, including a drawing sent to Theo on 2 July, supports a June date.
This helped establish the narrow field of view from which he may have observed the scene. They identified just three dates when the moon and Venus appeared in positions consistent with the painting’s composition. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam remains unconvinced.
“I was standing where Vincent had stood 130 years earlier,” said Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the study’s lead author and an astronomer at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. “To bring the question into science, which needs quantitative data we had to measure the degree of resemblance between the star patterns in the painting and the real sky, using shape geometry and statistics,” Kim said.
The team first located a ridge south-west of the asylum and compared its landscape with an earlier sketch by Van Gogh.
