A South Korean Team Says Van Gogh's Starry Night Shows a July Sky
Vincent van Gogh may have painted The Starry Night about a month later than art historians have long believed. A South Korean research team says the swirling sky in the painting matches the real view over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in southern France, around 22 July 1889.
The painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For decades, it has usually been dated to June 1889, based mainly on a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around 18 June that year. The new work moves that date back by about four weeks.
The study was led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, a doctoral candidate at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. ArtNews reports that Kim is also chief executive of a telescope maker in Seoul. The team's paper appeared in Scientific Reports under the title "The actual sky of Van Gogh's Starry Night" (DOI 10.1038/s41598-026-73025-5).
The team built its case from two kinds of evidence. The first is astronomical charts, which show where the stars, the moon and the planet Venus would have sat in the sky over Saint-Rémy in the predawn hours. The second is Van Gogh's own letters, several of which mention cicadas. Cicadas are insects that sing loudest in the heat of summer, so their mention points to the warmer months.
The painting's date is more than a footnote. It places the work within the months Van Gogh spent at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, which he entered shortly before the June date usually given. Hürriyet Daily News has reported on the new timeline, which would move the painting later in that stay.
For visitors to the Museum of Modern Art, nothing changes on the wall. The label, the painting and its place in the collection stay the same. What changes is the story told about when the artist looked up and painted what he saw.
For anyone who has stood in front of the swirling blues and yellows, the question is simple: what night was it? The team says the answer is a summer night in late July, when the sky above the hills of Provence was as the painting shows it. Other researchers have not yet been reported to have tested that claim in print.
