Researchers think they might have pinpointed the exact night sky that we see depicted in Vincent van Gogh’s iconic painting “The Starry Night.”
Perhaps one of the most famous paintings in modern history, Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” carries a legacy that continues to inspire and mystify generation after generation. But while you might see in its swirls of color and bright spots of starlight a night sky derived purely from imagination, some scientists think it represents an actual view — one that includes a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades cluster. And they may know exactly when this sky appeared..
In a new study, researchers suggest that “The Starry Night” depicts the pre-dawn sky seen around July 22, 1889 from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh painted it. But while this sky happens to perfectly match the one depicted in the artwork, art historians have long thought that Van Gogh painted this piece in June. Could these findings shift the date of this legendary artwork?
Finding a painted sky
This investigation started decades ago with art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell at UCLA in 1984 and continued in the following years with astronomer Charles Whitney at Harvard University. However, these earlier analyses did not agree with one another, and there was no true consensus about exactly when the sky matched with the painting.
So the question remained, lingering in the minds of those with a shared love for both art and space. And a team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the CEO of South Korean robotic telescope company SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University’s School of Space Research, picked up the search once more.
“When they see a fragment of a starry sky, observational astronomers like me and amateur astronomers alike will want to solve the puzzle. I am simply someone who pursued that process a little more actively,” Kim told Space.com.
But how did Kim’s team come to their conclusion, after others had failed to nail down a date over the decades? In short, “we analyzed the painting astronomically, analyzed documents about his situation in July 1889, and then carried out ecological and meteorological investigations,” Kim said.
To start with, the team analyzed the sky from the exact location in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh is said to have painted “The Starry Night.” They then used observational geometry to map the historical night sky.
“Modern telescopes are equipped with a function called astrometry, which compares an image of the night sky with celestial coordinates stored in a computer and automatically extracts the coordinates of the image,” Kim said. “We used Procrustes analysis, a method that compares only the ‘shape’ of two sets of points. After matching their position, size and rotation, it measures how similar the two shapes are from the differences that remain (the residuals).”
“Because a star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality and slightly tilted, this method was the right fit. It allowed us to explain, in quantitative terms, what earlier studies had described only qualitatively as ‘resembling a certain constellation,'” Kim added.
But this quantitative analysis wasn’t enough to say for sure that this was the right-fitting sky, as different constellations could fit to a similar degree, Kim explained. To get closer to their answer, the team combined their analysis with a deep dive through history.
“We also checked whether the stars were actually in that part of the pre-dawn sky on that date, whether they fall within the painter’s field of view, and whether the appearance of the moon and Venus matches the painting. It was the Hyades that satisfied all of these conditions,” Kim said.
Exploring astro-art history
As mentioned, the date of this matching sky comes in late July, a month after art historians think Van Gogh painted “The Starry Night.” But the researchers suggest that their findings could provide evidence to support the idea that the work was actually painted in July.
Letters written by Van Gogh as early as 1888 describe his desire to paint a star-filled sky. A letter dated April 12, 1888 reads: “A starry sky, for example, well — it’s a thing that I’d like to try to do, just as in the daytime I’ll try to paint a green meadow studded with dandelions.”
Kim followed these letters through the months to try and find more information that could potentially alleviate the discrepancy between the matching skies and the actual month the painting was created. Kim pointed to a letter from between late May and early June 1889 that reads: “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.”
Kim drew on “personal imagination” to find ties between Van Gogh’s sky observations in these months and what they might mean for the painting’s timeline, Kim shared, so this doesn’t definitively change the view of this painting’s history. However, Kim suggested that these records could indicate that Van Gogh was repeatedly looking up and watching the pre-dawn sky, which could have led to him seeing this exact sky on July 22.
The painting itself even ignites uncertainty among art historians. As the researchers cite in their new paper, leading art historians see “The Starry Night” as stylistically different from Van Gogh’s other works during the month of June, drawing further questions over the date painted.
“What our study shows is that the sky in the painting matches, in both observation and shape, the real pre-dawn sky around July 22. So, what we propose is the possibility that Vincent conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22,” Kim said.
However, “I think further research in art history and conservation science could shed more light on this question,” Kim added.
This work was described in a study published Oct. 22 in the journal Scientific Reports.