Astronomers discover the exact date that Vincent van Gogh painted his iconic Starry Night

One of the most famous images in modern art was long believed to be a celestial vision born of the brilliant, bereft mind of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh.However, new research suggests Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” is more depiction than imagination and may have been based on a real summer sky at daybreak.Researchers from Kyung Hee University in Yongin, South Korea say Van Gogh may have actually seen the heavenly bodies he committed to canvas from his vantage at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he was recovering from one among a constellation of mental health crises.“Observation and imagination have commonly been treated as an either/or, yet ‘The Starry Night’ shows the two coexisting on one canvas,” said the study’s authors, whose work was published in Nature this week.The presumed date for the creation of the work was previously thought to be June of 1889, based on a letter Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo on June 18 in which he describes working on “a new study of a starry sky” and Van Gogh’s subsequent July breakdown, an episode that rendered him unable to paint for several weeks.However, researchers hypothesize that if Van Gogh had painted the scene around July 22 of 1880, the moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster depicted in the painting would have matched the night sky he saw from his asylum window, making the painting an impression of reality rather than pure imagination.

To prove this possibility, researchers located a ridge southwest of the asylum that matched an earlier Van Gogh sketch.“I was standing where Vincent had stood 130 years earlier,” said Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the study’s first author and an astronomer at Kyung Hee University.

Using astronomy software, Kim and his team recreated an image of the dawn sky for each day in June and July of 1889.“To bring the question into science, which needs quantitative data, we had to measure the degree of resemblance between the star patterns in the painting a...