Astronomers say van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ may have been inspired by real celestial arrangement

By Amarachi Orie, CNN

(CNN) — For more than a century, Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” was believed to have been the result of imagination, previous drawings and memories of scenes he had seen outside his barred asylum bedroom window in France.

However, the 1889 artwork was probably rooted much more in observation than fantasy, according to scientists in South Korea who say they have identified the actual night sky potentially depicted by the post-impressionist Dutch painter.

An exuberant pre-dawn sky — filled with large, bright stars, a luminous crescent moon, and blue and white swirls — dominates the landscape featuring a prominent cypress tree and distant hillside village.

This skyscape resembles the celestial arrangement present in the sky in the early hours of July 22, 1889, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers from South Korean space science company SLLAB and Kyung Hee University in Seoul used a separate van Gogh drawing considered to show the landscape of “The Starry Night” to identify the hilly site he saw.

They placed the landscape southwest of the asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France, where van Gogh created the oil on canvas during a 12-month stay.

The researchers created a simulation of the sky above that hilly site in the early hours of July 22, 1889. It showed the moon and Venus positioned in opposite corners of the frame, with the moon high in the top right corner and Venus at the bottom left.

In between them both lay the Hyades cluster, which is formed of hundreds of stars in the Taurus constellation. Five bright stars in this constellation are known to be visible to the naked eye without a telescope, and the Hyades star cluster is known to form a bright “V” shape.

In van Gogh’s painting, the moon is positioned in the top right corner, diagonally above Venus, which is center left, with other stars positioned left of the moon.

“A painter does not draw stars at their true size or orientation. A star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality, and slightly tilted,” lead study author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer and engineer and the CEO of SLLAB, told CNN over email.

So, the researchers used a Procrustes shape analysis, which “removes differences in position, size and rotation and then compares only the ‘shape’ of two sets of points,” he said, enabling them to closely match five stars in the central arrangement in “The Starry Night” with the Hyades cluster arrangement that night.

“The relative positions of the stars preserve the skeleton of the Hyades,” the researchers concluded, adding that this indicates the “work did not invent a sky that was not there but transferred an observed arrangement onto canvas through stylistic amplification.”

The same statical shape analysis also allowed the researchers to map van Gogh’s 1888 oil painting “Café Terrace at Night” on to the Summer Triangle star pattern.

Interpret ‘with caution’

“The Starry Night” was painted in mid-June of 1889, according to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is housed.

This dating by art historians is based on a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around June 18, in which he mused, “At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky,” according to the researchers.

However, around that time, the moon appeared almost full, according to the study, rather than the waning crescent shape van Gogh depicted.

“Also, around June 19 is close to the summer solstice, when no impressive stars rise in the pre-dawn sky,” Kim told CNN. “Around July 22, by contrast, the Hyades rose in the east together with Venus, and the moon’s shape was close to the crescent in the painting.”

The newly proposed July time period is supported by a previous examination of van Gogh’s canvas, which suggests the artist left places for the stars unpainted, only filling in those gaps after the blue sky was done. The researchers said this confirms that his star pattern “was a structure intended in advance” and “deliberately planned.”

Van Gogh has long been thought to have had a seizure in mid-July that potentially left him incapacitated in the weeks following, which could have made it impossible for him to observe and paint the sky at that time, the researchers said.

However, they re-examined original French and Dutch letters, as well as contemporary weather records, finding that the seizure could have occurred in late July and potentially only lasted a day or two.

“The authors put forward an engaging framework that combines astronomical modeling, historical meteorological data, and letter analysis to propose a late-July 1889 observational window,” Yongxiang Huang, an associate professor at the Center for Marine Meteorology and Climate Change at Xiamen University in China, told CNN over email.

However, despite this “fresh” perspective, “astronomical alignments on a canvas must be interpreted with caution,” said Huang, who was not involved in the study.

He added that “Vincent van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist master, not an optical camera,” and “attempting to pinpoint an exact date primarily based on celestial coordinates painted onto a canvas remains fragile.”

In 2024, Huang found that the swirls in “The Starry Night” align with a physical law that governs fluid dynamics known as Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence, “reflecting an intuitive capture of complex natural flows,” he said.

Yet, “flow patterns depicted by artists often diverge markedly from exact physical reality due to aesthetic intent, emotional expression, and stylization.” Similarly, “an artist’s depiction of celestial geometry is inherently prone to painterly distortion, subjective rearrangement, and human error.”

Tying art with astronomy

“Being an artist, Vincent likely mixed ‘imagination’ and ‘observation,’” astronomer Ulrike Kuchner, an interdisciplinary art-science researcher, curator and artist who was not involved in the study, told CNN over email. “For example, the most obvious mismatch with the June date is the shape of the moon. What if he simply didn’t like the fuller moon and used his artistic licence?”

Kuchner described the paper as “exciting detective work,” saying: “If the date changes, the history books on his medical history need updating too, because the timing of his seizure, or his ability to paint afterwards, would have to be revised.”

She noted, however, that the fundamental question of whether the artwork was a spontaneous fantasy or a realistic depiction based on observation is “never really addressed” by the research.

The new study was limited by 19th-century meteorological records, which predate standardized observation and may not have the precision of modern records.

The research also cannot determine when van Gogh began painting the artwork and whether he later reworked the canvas.

While the star cluster on July 22, 1889, best fits the central star arrangement in “The Starry Night,” the researchers said they assume observations of the sky over several nights were integrated into the artwork.

“The order of brushstrokes or any later reworking cannot be determined by astronomy, so what we propose is the possibility that Vincent conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22,” Kim said.

“This is my personal opinion rather than a result of our study, but given the way Vincent worked, it is also possible that he completed a painting that had been left unfinished in a very short time,” he added. “The canvas of ‘The Starry Night’ has quite a lot of bare areas where no paint was applied. This fits with the possibility that the work was done in a hurry.”

Kim said finding more historical French weather records and letters sent from van Gogh to other painters, if any survive and mention “The Starry Night,” could determine even more precisely when the painting was created.

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