Van Gogh's famous swirling sky may have been inspired by a real night, on the morning of July 22, 1889.
The Starry Night is one of the painter's best-known works. Painted in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, it shows a crescent Moon, large luminous stars and a restless sky above a village. Art historians generally date its creation to June 1889.
The Starry Night, painted by Vincent van Gogh in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889. A large cypress stands out in front of a village beneath a luminous, swirling sky.
Work: Vincent van Gogh (1889), public domain. Image details.
Wikimedia image
Researchers wanted to determine whether the stars in the painting matched an arrangement that could actually have been observed from the region. Using astronomy software, they reconstructed the skies on mornings in June and July 1889, when Van Gogh was staying in Saint-Rémy.
Their calculations led them to July 22, shortly before dawn. That morning, the Moon, the planet Venus and a group of stars called the Hyades were in a position that, according to the team, resembles the one in the painting. The Hyades form a V-shaped pattern near the star Aldebaran.
To test this resemblance, the researchers compared the positions of the bright points with those of the celestial bodies. They also studied Van Gogh's drawings, the landscape around Saint-Rémy, weather records from the period and the letters the painter sent to his family.
According to them, Van Gogh may have observed this sky and then transformed its shapes and colors to create his work. The painting would therefore not be a faithful reproduction, but an artistic composition based in part on a real observation.
This interpretation nevertheless faces a significant problem. Archives show that Van Gogh was already referring to a study of a starry sky in June. Above all, a letter dated July 2, 1889, is associated with the sending of a drawing depicting The Starry Night, well before the July 22 date proposed by the new study.
The Van Gogh Museum therefore maintains that the painting was made in June. Specialists also dispute the way the team matched the stars with the observed portion of the sky. The study's authors themselves acknowledge that several observations may have been combined into a single image.
The date of July 22 is therefore a new proposal, intriguing but debated. The mystery of The Starry Night may lie precisely between what the painter saw, what he remembered and what he chose to paint.