While Starry Night is the traditional shorthand for Vincent van Gogh’s most famous work, its actual title is The Starry Night. It’s a more fitting name for such an iconic work, but does the painting depict an actual starry night, or did it spring from van Gogh’s vivid imagination?
Art historians have debated the question for decades, but now astronomers are getting in on the action with a new study published in Scientific Reports. By taking a multidisciplinary approach that involves observational geometry, historical weather records, and even cicadas, they think they’ve nailed down the actual date of The Starry Night in question.
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Originally, van Gogh’s work was thought to be just an artistic representation of a night sky. But when researchers surfaced a letter written by the painter mentioning Venus, some acknowledged that at least one of the painting’s swirly glowing orbs was inspired by a real celestial body. (You can see it just above the horizon, to the right of the cypress tree’s branch.)
In the 1980s, researchers started taking the painting seriously as an astronomical text. Using the position of the Venus orb as a lodestar and matching it to planetarium reconstructions of the night sky, art historian Albert Boime determined that three stars corresponded to the constellation Aries as it was visible from the location on June 19, 1889. The date came from letters van Gogh had sent to his brother, along with sketches of the work, detailing the painting.
There was one glaring problem with Boime’s analysis—the moon was all wrong. Looking out from the window of his asylum in late June, van Gogh would have seen a waning gibbous, not the slivered crescent he painted. This discrepancy, to Boime, was van Gogh taking a bit of artistic license. According to the historian, the glowing lunar penumbra and apparent paint scraped from the concave surface of the crescent indicate van Gogh may have painted the fuller gibbous, then changed his mind.
But per this new study, Biome’s analysis is incorrect, and the clue was the constellation he identified in the work. “To an observational astronomer, the cluster of stars in The Starry Night is the Hyades in Taurus,” study author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim of Kyung Hee University in South Korea said in a statement. “But the moment I read the earlier studies explaining it as Aries, I heard the painting calling to me.”
Kim and his colleagues proposed a new date for the painting. According to the team, van Gogh painted the pre-dawn sky of July 22, 1889. On that night, the Hyades (which form a V shape) would have been visible alongside Venus near the horizon and a crescent moon. In fact, the team’s shape analysis confirmed the correspondence between five central stars of The Starry Night and the Hyades, and proved to be an even better match with a sketch van Gogh made after completing the painting.
So all the stars seemed to be aligned for a late July completion, but the team ran into another problem. Most scholars agree van Gogh suffered a seizure around mid-July that left him unable to paint for some time. If that timeline is correct, the researchers’ would be impossible.
To investigate, the team turned once again to van Gogh’s correspondences. In one letter, van Gogh said the seizure struck while painting on a windy day. Using weather records from the time, the researchers determined that there were only intermittent winds from the 15th to 26th of July, but strong mistral gusts starting on July 27th.
Additionally, van Gogh wrote about The Starry Night along with other summer paintings, and specifically mentioned the sweltering climate and cicadas. While June only had four days above 86 degrees Fahrenheit (which the researchers say is cicada weather), July had eighteen, including over two weeks of consecutive scorchers.
Of course, none of this proves that van Gogh painted The Starry Night on the date in question, but it does suggest the day was the focal point of his observations, the researchers say. While we may never know for certain which starry night inspired the iconic painting, there’s one thing we can all agree on: It looks fantastic on a dorm room wall.