Moon

Researchers link the moon in Van Gogh's The Starry Night to a July sky

A South Korean research team has matched the moon and other objects in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night to a late-July sky, raising questions about the painting's accepted June 1889 date, Scoop Upworthy reports. The team reconstructed the view outside the artist's window in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France.

The researchers favor a predawn scene around July 22, 1889, according to Nagaland Post. Their study appeared in Scientific Reports and was led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the chief executive of a Seoul telescope maker. The proposed sky is about a month later than the conventional date for the painting.

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The crescent moon points to July#

Scoop Upworthy reports that the painting's thin crescent was at odds with the traditional mid-June date. The researchers tracked a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster, a group of stars, and concluded that their arrangement was a closer match in late July.

The proposed arrangement placed Venus toward one corner of the scene, the moon toward the opposite corner and the Hyades nearer the center, according to The Brighter Side of News. The celestial pattern was compared by the team with five selected points in the painting, and a related black-and-white drawing by Van Gogh was also examined.

The drawing showed a stronger resemblance to the proposed pattern, The Brighter Side of News reports. But the outlet notes that the reconstruction's observing location and viewing geometry are not measurements documented by Van Gogh, and the comparison cannot establish when he made his observations.

The painting's date remains disputed#

The conventional June date draws on a letter Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo, according to Scoop Upworthy. The Economic Times reports that the artist referred to a fresh study depicting a starry sky in the June 18 letter. The Museum of Modern Art in New York still lists The Starry Night as a June 1889 work.

The museum's account describes the painting as a combination of observation and artistic transformation, according to The Brighter Side of News. The outlet notes that the proposed July sky is a possible source for the composition, rather than proof of the day Van Gogh painted or finished the canvas.

Jose Luis Aragon, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who was not involved in the study, told AP that the moon's appearance in mid-June presented a puzzle. He called the July date "an intriguing hypothesis rather than a settled answer," according to Nagaland Post.

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