Forensic astronomers in South Korea argue that van Gogh’s The Starry Night shows the actual predawn sky over Saint-Remy-de-Provence around July 22, 1889. Art historians have long dated it to June 1889, shortly after van Gogh admitted himself into the asylum there.
The argument seems to be based on the shape of the Moon in mid-June 1889. That month the Moon was a fat waning gibbous, nothing like the thin crescent in the painting. By late July 1889, a crescent Moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster rose in the east from the vantage point where he painted them.
Van Gogh worked from sketches and memory, so his sky could blend several nights, but it’s cool to use astronomy more than a century later to date an iconic painting.
This was originally posted as a New Arrival in From Pyramids to Diamonds · The Catalog · №012, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.