Scientists believe they may have identified the real night sky behind one of the world's most famous artworks.
Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night was long believed to have been painted in June of 1889, inspired by what the Dutch artist saw as he gazed skyward from a psychiatric asylum in southern France.
Months earlier, he'd cut off his left ear during an argument with painter Paul Gauguin.
But based on the constellation said to be depicted in the painting, the date didn't add up for South Korean researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the CEO of a Seoul telescope maker. So he set out with a research team to investigate.
"Once I learned that it was the constellation Aries, I felt that something was a bit off," Kim said.
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"While Aries is a highly significant constellation, it is composed of rather faint stars; therefore, it was difficult to accept that an ordinary person — let alone a painter — could have observed it and then depicted it in this way."
Long fascinated by van Gogh's art, Kim traveled to France in 2019, the first time in mid-June and the second time in July. He found brilliant stars rising in July's predawn sky, unlike June.
His research team has now traced the scene in the painting to 22 July, around a month later than the previous date.
The researchers reconstructed the night sky above Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, using astronomical calculations, historical weather records and letters exchanged between van Gogh and his younger brother Theo.
Their findings suggest the painting may depict stars in the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus, rather than Aries.
But London art critic Tabish Khan says there's no way of knowing for certain.
He says while artists often draw inspiration from their surroundings, it's impossible to verify whether van Gogh observed any particular astronomical phenomenon or whether he worked it into his painting.
But it "might be an interesting footnote in art history to know that there was that phenomena happening at the time that Van Goff painted it", he said.
Jose Luis Aragon, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has studied the painting himself. He says the new research addresses "a real puzzle" that in mid-June 1889, the moon was not the thin crescent painted by van Gogh.
But since the artist painted in a studio in the asylum from sketches and memory, "the sky is likely a composite of many nights as the authors themselves acknowledge", Aragon said.
More than eighty years after Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, American singer-songwriter Don McLean found inspiration in the artwork.
In 1971, after reading about the artist and his brother, he wrote the song Vincent, which is often known by its opening words, "starry, starry night".
In a documentary for Dutch television's NTR, McLean said he wasn't just trying to describe the painting; he wanted to capture the man behind it.
"I took his most famous painting and used the colours and the energy and the forms, and everything, to try to grab hold of what I perceived to be his essence as a human being," he said.
Van Gogh's life was marked by poverty, rejection and periods of serious mental illness. During those difficult years, he produced some of his most celebrated works.
For McLean, van Gogh's paintings were inseparable from the suffering he experienced during his life.
"Pain is a very important part of art. You know, and people are on drugs today, or they don't have Prozac. You know, they don't feel anything, so they can't be artists. You got to suffer," he said at the time.
More than fifty years after McLean first released Vincent, the song has taken on a life of its own, with generations of musicians finding something in his words that speaks to them, including Josh Groban, Ellie Goulding and James Blake.
When van Gogh painted The Starry Night 137 years ago, he may never have imagined that the night sky above a small town in southern France would one day inspire a song heard around the world — and scientists to go looking for the stars that started it all.
The research may finally help explain what van Gogh was looking at, but we may never know what he saw in those stars.
