Scholars have long accepted June 1889 as the month when Vincent van Gogh painted the iconic blue eddied-sky and idyllic hillside village of "The Starry Night." Yet a new Scientific Reports study published Thursday, October 22, calls for reconsidering that date, suggesting the Post-Impressionist painter may have drawn inspiration from a night sky that appeared a month later.
South Korean researchers Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, Suna Kang, Jungwoo Song, and Ho Jin argue that several celestial forms in the painting contradict the original June 1889 date and are better supported by the conditions of July that same year. The study incorporates tools that analyze star patterns and positions, contemporary weather models, van Gogh's letters, and other methods of inquiry in what the researchers call a "multidisciplinary framework."
"Earlier astronomical readings, constrained by the conventional June dating, reached mutually exclusive conclusions, and the painting’s celestial arrangement was never quantitatively tested," the report's abstract reads. "These findings suggest that the night sky in The Starry Night originated from observation of a specific celestial arrangement, and call for reconsidering the June dating."
In June 1889, the artist was weeks into his harrowing yearlong confinement at a French asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a few months after he'd famously severed his left ear during a row with painter Paul Gauguin. The view from his asylum window was thought to have inspired his expressionist masterpiece, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.