Astronomical Simulations Pinpoint Date of Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night'
A study in Scientific Reports says Van Gogh's The Starry Night likely shows the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence around July 22, 1889, not June as art historians had thought.
Newsnibs Staff
- 2026-10-24
- Updated 7:37 AM UTC
(Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France)
Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" most likely shows the sky before dawn on or around July 22, 1889, above Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. Art historians had placed the scene in June 1889, based on the artist's letters to his brother Theo.
The paper, titled "The actual sky of Van Gogh's Starry Night: a multidisciplinary reconstruction," was led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer and PhD candidate affiliated with SLLAB and Kyung Hee University in South Korea. Accounts differ on the size of the team. One describes the work as that of two South Korean researchers, while others name only Kim.
Van Gogh painted the canvas while a patient at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in southern France. The researchers used his earlier sketches to reconstruct his view from the asylum, then ran astronomical simulations to compare the painting with the sky of the period. The canvas shows a waning crescent moon, Venus, and a group of stars the study identifies as the Hyades cluster in Taurus, not the constellation Aries.
The moon was the clearest clue. On June 19, 1889, it was 63 percent illuminated, a gibbous phase that does not fit the thin crescent Van Gogh painted. By July 22 it had shrunk to 28 percent. Five stars in the painting sit at a tilt of 33.13 degrees, inside the range of 32.6 to 35.1 degrees measured for the real Hyades that morning. A pen drawing Van Gogh made after the painting matches that night's sky even more closely, the study found.
Historical weather archives show conditions on July 22, 1889, were good for viewing the night sky. Kim suggests Van Gogh may have started the painting in June and finished it in late July. That timeline fits records of a strong mistral wind from July 27 to 29, 1889, and Van Gogh's own letters describing a relapse in his health while he was working in the fields.
The authors say the astronomical match does not prove Van Gogh painted the work on that exact date. The findings conflict with earlier studies from the mid-1980s, and the later timing may also answer earlier questions about when the artist's seizures happened.
French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet has also studied the painting's sky, publishing a book on the subject in September and a new scholarly work with Seghers editions in October. "The Starry Night" belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Photo by Paul Lichtblau on Unsplash
