Vincent van Gogh’s most famous sky may owe less to imagination than to a sleepless pre-dawn look out of his window. Researchers from South Korea argue that the celestial scene in The Starry Night matches the heavens over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence around July 22, 1889, roughly a month after the date art historians usually give the canvas.
Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, head of a Seoul firm that builds telescopes, steered the work, which appeared in Scientific Reports. His team found that at that point in July a slim waning moon hung in the early-morning sky, close to what the painting shows. Rising over the eastern horizon alongside it were Venus and the Hyades, a star group in Taurus. Historical weather data suggest the nights were clear enough for the painter to see it all from the asylum where he was living.
That fits awkwardly with the traditional June date, when the moon was nowhere near a thin crescent. Mexican physicist José Luis Aragón, a UNAM researcher who has examined the painting but was not involved, calls this “a real puzzle” and praises the careful, cross-disciplinary method. Before tackling van Gogh, the team validated its technique on other paintings with recognisable skies.
Still, Aragón prefers to treat July as “an intriguing hypothesis” rather than a verdict. Van Gogh finished the work in a studio, using sketches and memory, so the sky could blend several nights, a caveat the authors accept. Other experts quoted by Smithsonian magazine are also unconvinced the positions in the picture can pin down a single date. Kim, for his part, is unmoved. “I will bet on this date,” he said.
