Starry Night Study Ties Van Gogh’s Sky to July 1889, but Experts Push Back

A new study argues that Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night shows a real sky: the view before dawn from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, around July 22, 1889. The Starry Night study, published in Scientific Reports on Oct. 22, 2026, would push the painting’s usual June 1889 date back by about a month, but the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and at least one veteran “forensic astronomer” are not convinced.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project).

What the Starry Night study claims

The paper, “The actual sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a multidisciplinary reconstruction,” is by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, Suna Kang, Jungwoo Song and Ho Jin. Kim is CEO of SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, according to Space.com.

The authors argue that the painting shows three real objects in the eastern sky before sunrise: a waning crescent Moon (about 28% lit), the planet Venus, and the Hyades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. On the morning of about July 22, 1889, all three would have fit together in a fairly narrow slice of sky seen from the asylum where van Gogh was staying, with the Moon and Venus about 18.6 degrees apart, the paper says.

Speaking to Space.com, Kim said the team’s work shows that the sky in the painting matches the real sky, and that the researchers propose Vincent “conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22.”

How the researchers matched the sky

Earlier attempts to tie the painting to a real sky had trouble because the scene does not fit a wide, ordinary view of the horizon. Kim’s team approached it as a question of framing. Working from one of van Gogh’s related sketches, they estimated that the scene corresponds to a narrow field of view, about the equivalent of a 134 mm camera lens, with a diagonal of roughly 18.4 degrees.

Within that frame, they compared the positions of the bright objects in the painting with computed positions in the sky and measured how closely the shapes match. They also noted that a “V” shape formed by the stars in the painting is tilted at about 33 degrees, within the range the Hyades cluster would have shown on the relevant mornings.

The study also leans on the calendar. The traditional June dating rests largely on a letter of June 18, 1889, in which van Gogh mentions “a new study of a starry sky.” But the authors point out that the Moon on June 19 was about 63% lit, much fuller than the thin crescent in the painting. They cite weather records showing 18 days in July 1889 above 30 degrees Celsius, and argue that another letter suggests van Gogh’s major mental-health crisis that summer began around July 25 or 26.

Why experts are skeptical

The Van Gogh Museum, which holds the artist’s letters and has studied his Saint-Rémy period closely, says the painting was made in June 1889. In a statement reported by The Guardian, it noted that van Gogh received a roll of canvas in early June, sent a drawing on July 2, and suffered a severe breakdown around July 22 that left him unable to paint for more than a month.

“Van Gogh was not concerned with exact likenesses,” the museum said. “The positions of the celestial bodies depicted can therefore not form a reliable basis for dating the work.”

Donald Olson, a Texas State University astronomer known for using astronomy to date artworks and historical events, also told The Guardian he was not persuaded. He said the narrow field of view the study relies on does not fit the much wider view that would be needed to include the hills in the painting.

Readers should also note two disclosures in the paper: the authors report a commercial interest connected to SLLAB, and they say AI tools were used for editing. Neither undermines the analysis on its own, but both are standard information to weigh.

A long history of sky detectives

This is not the first attempt to read The Starry Night as astronomy. Art historian Albert Boime, working with astronomer George Abell, argued in 1984 that the painting reflects the real sky over Saint-Rémy, and Harvard’s Charles Whitney has also studied the painting’s sky, the paper notes. Kim said further art-history research could help settle the question.

The painting itself has hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941. Whatever the date, the new study shows how astronomers keep using the sky’s predictable clockwork to probe history. For more space science, read our reports on a rare green-glowing white dwarf star and Japan’s MMX mission to bring back samples from Mars’ moon Phobos.

Sources

• Scientific Reports: The actual sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a multidisciplinary reconstruction
• Space.com: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night depicts the sky on July 22, 1889, researchers find
• The Guardian: Astronomers’ dating of Van Gogh’s Starry Night questioned by experts
• Science News: Study links Van Gogh’s Starry Night to the real sky
• Wikimedia Commons: Van Gogh, Starry Night, Google Art Project (public domain)