New Study Reveals Exact Date of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night
- How could an invented sky fit the sky of a particular date this closely?
- That finding challenges the long-held assumption that the famous post-Impressionist canvas was purely a product of the artist's imagination during his stay in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
- Lead researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer and founder of a telescope-building company called SLLAB Inc.
How could an invented sky fit the sky of a particular date this closely?
a team of researchers wrote in Scientific Reports, reporting that Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night
may have been based on one specific night sky on July 22, 1889, just before dawn over France, sciencenews.org reported on October 22, 2026.
That finding challenges the long-held assumption that the famous post-Impressionist canvas was purely a product of the artist’s imagination during his stay in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Art historians typically date the creation of The Starry Night
to mid-June 1889, relying heavily on a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around June 18, 1889, mentioning a new study of a starry sky.
Astronomical Analysis and the Hyades Cluster
Lead researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer and founder of a telescope-building company called SLLAB Inc. in Seoul, South Korea, approached the artwork without relying on the traditional June timeline. Instead of accepting an older 1980s theory that the painting depicted the constellation Aries—a grouping Kim deemed too faint to inspire a painter in a predawn sky—his team identified the painted stars as the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus.
To test that identification, Kim and his colleagues applied a statistical technique known as Procrustes shape analysis to quantify how closely the stars in the painting matched real celestial coordinates. They also analyzed another skyscape, Starry Night Over the Rhône,
which clearly depicts the Big Dipper, finding a similar degree of matching between the art and the actual night sky. Using modern computer simulations to calculate the positions of celestial objects down to the second, alongside the position and phase of the moon and Venus, the researchers concluded that July 22, 1889, offered the best fit for their data.
Scholarly Debate Over Field of View
Not all researchers agree with the new dating or the methodology behind it. Astronomer Donald Olson of Texas State University in San Marcos, who has published work on astronomy in art history, raised doubts about the narrow field of view assumed by the study authors. Olson argued that such a narrow scope, which is essential to the theory that the Hyades fill most of the canvas, contradicts the much wider field of view needed to encompass the painting’s round hills and cliffs.
Olson further questioned whether an experienced amateur astronomer, when prompted to look for the Hyades, would actually identify Aldebaran—the brightest star in the cluster, located at the bottom left of the characteristic V shape—as either of the two stars positioned to the left of the cypress tree in van Gogh’s painting. These contrasting interpretations highlight the ongoing tension between traditional art historical dating and modern astronomical reconstruction methods.