IF THE STARS ALIGN

New Study Reveals True Inspiration for Iconic Van Gogh Painting

The painting is among the most recognizable in art history.

Scientists may have matched Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “The Starry Night” to a specific celestial scene. Art historians long thought the painting depicted the sky in June 1889, when van Gogh was a patient at a psychiatric hospital in France’s Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, but new research challenges that date. A team of South Korean scientists says the painting actually shows a pre-dawn sky around July 22, 1889. Researchers traveled to France twice to analyze the sky in mid-June and late July. They also examined the moon’s shape and consulted historical weather records. “No two skies are the same. Something always changes,” lead researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim told The Washington Post. “I believe Vincent noticed those changes and put them into the painting.” Still, some experts are more skeptical. Jose Luis Aragon, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has also studied the painting, told the Post that he views it as an “intriguing hypothesis rather than a settled answer.”