Study links van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ to predawn sky on July 22, 1889
A team led by South Korean astronomer Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim has proposed that Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” depicts the sky over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, shortly before dawn on July 22, 1889. The findings were reported October 22 in *Scientific Reports*.
The researchers identified five prominent painted stars as members of the Hyades star cluster in Taurus, rather than the constellation Aries suggested by an earlier analysis. They used Procrustes shape analysis, a statistical method for comparing arrangements of points, to evaluate the match. Their reconstruction also identified a waning crescent moon and Venus in positions consistent with the painting.
The proposed date differs from the conventional art-historical timeline. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo on or about June 18, 1889, that he had completed “a new study of a starry sky,” and historians have generally …