A study by South Korean researchers argues that Vincent van Gogh may have been inspired by his observation of an actual sky in painting The Starry Night, 1889. The Guardian reports that the astronomers narrowed the date of the celestial event to around July 22, 1889, which would mean that Van Gogh composed the work a month later than is widely believed.
The Dutch painter was inspired by a view out his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he stayed for twelve months in 1889–90. The painting, which is the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is dated June 1889 and is thought to be made mid-month.
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On June 18, the painter wrote to his brother Theo describing “a new study of a starry sky,” but in July, Van Gogh experienced a mental breakdown that left him unable to paint for weeks. But by moving the date to July, according to researchers, the moon, Venus, and a star cluster called the Hyades that are depicted in the painting could have been seen by Van Gogh from his window at the asylum.
The South Korean team matched a ridge that lays southwest of the asylum to an earlier sketch by Van Gogh and used astronomy software to re-create the dawn sky for every day in June and July 1889. That narrowed possible dates to three, and July 22 proved the closest match, with the trio of celestial bodies arranged as they are in the painting.
“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,” Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer at Kyung Hee University in Yongin, South Korea, said.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and experts are not convinced. The latter contends that on July 2 Van Gogh sent Theo a drawing based on the painting and that because of his breakdown on July 22, he was rendered unable to paint. The Guardian also cites Donald Olson, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Texas State University, who said, “The authors’ assumed narrow field of view, essential for their theory that the stars of the Hyades fill most of the canvas, is inconsistent with the much wider field of view required to encompass Starry Night’s round hills and cliffs.”