{"id":42947,"date":"2026-11-04T12:43:29","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=42947"},"modified":"2026-11-04T12:43:29","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:43:29","slug":"too-cool-part-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2026\/11\/too-cool-part-56\/","title":{"rendered":"Too cool, part 56"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve said before that there’s only so far I get into ‘art,’ both in my own work and with appreciating the work of others. Aesthetically, I’m all for it, and am far more entranced by anyone that can handle realism than I am over particular styles and genres, and in line with that, I’m not terribly captivated by impressionism, expressionism, post-modernism, or indeed any of the various and countless ways of describing art, and couldn’t tell you what most of them are. As for meaning and spiritualism? Go away.<\/p>\n

So when it comes to Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night<\/em>, one of the more recognized and replicated works of ‘recent’ art, well, it’s cute, and I like the colors, but it’s also harsh to me, tracing bold lines in the sky during conditions where little should show at all, much less that distinctly. I understand that Van Gogh was trying for particular ideas, as do all artists, but they’re not ideas that I find any connection with.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Starry Night,<\/em> by Vincent Van Gogh<\/figcaption><\/figure>Universe Today<\/em>, however, recently featured an article<\/a> on it that I can<\/em> get into – not about styles or moods or underlying metaphors, but instead using the elements within to pin down exactly what night Van Gogh was making his preliminary sketches. It’s long been known that he spent some time in an asylum near St-R\u00e9my-de-Provence, France, struggling with seizures, and produced several works during this time, the most well-known of them being The Starry Night<\/em>, (which he did not personally consider a good piece of work.) The stylized representations of the moon and stars along a cypress and over a small village had long been believed to be representational rather than directly observed – inspired by real life, but placed in the frame as Van Gogh desired. The village, especially, does not match anything that he could have observed from St-R\u00e9my.<\/p>\n

Then in the 1980s, a pair of researchers introduced the idea that the sky directly represented, with a degree of accuracy, what Van Gogh had<\/em> observed on a particular night, identifying the stars as those of Aries, along with the moon and Venus, and combined more with the details Van Gogh related in letters to his brother, proposed that the painting was at least laid out on June 19th<\/sup>, 1889. This became a widely-accepted hypothesis, even featured prominently in Wikipedia’s entry on the painting.<\/p>\n

According to astronomy student Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim at the Kyung Hee University School of Space Research, however, the arrangement of stars in the sky was not a very close match for Aries, instead being a far more accurate depiction of the Hyades asterism (‘constellation,’ if that’s easier though technically incorrect,) plus the moon was the wrong phase for that date in June. Along with co-authors Suna Kang, Jungwoo Song, & Ho Jin, Kim makes a very strong case<\/a> that the actual date was instead July 22, 1889, supporting this with extensive comparisons of astronomical conditions, field of view, weather conditions, and the fact that the details elaborated through Van Gogh’s letters were far from specific. On that date, the moon was indeed a crescent phase as depicted, Venus was visible in the pre-dawn hours, and all aligned with the Hyades cluster within the field of view that Van Gogh appeared to be using, to a fairly high degree of accuracy. Other sketches of Van Gogh’s are actually more<\/em> accurate, indicating that he likely did these while observing the actual sky, rather than stylistically or from memory.<\/p>\n

This is what I find the most interesting, because they forensically determined what the artist was doing on a particular night over a century ago, based on what the actual conditions were and supporting details. Is this a closed case? Not necessarily, because as previously noted, portions of the painting were clearly created by Van Gogh through artistic license, so the idea that it was an observational study – painting from what he was seeing at the time – is not supported. They make a strong case that it was partially observational though, and even apply this to Caf\u00e9 Terrace at Night<\/em>, another of Van Gogh’s more well-known works and appearing to also depict an actual night sky, albeit with more license this time.<\/p>\n

Immediately upon reading this, I started wondering if The Starry Night<\/em> wasn’t based on a hazy or, more likely, foggy morning, since the celestial objects are all shrouded in glow, exactly the kind that would be produced by faintly-obscuring humidity, and the curls in the sky as well as the glow along the horizon further suggest this, especially the reflection of village lights – though, again, since there was no real village there, the best we can say is that Van Gogh depicted this from memory of other times or places. The weather records cited in that paper also only indicate a clear night during an extended hot period, no mention of fog, but I’d like to see what was actually recorded, and whether such things would have been noted.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s very cool when someone can take clues presented or recorded at various times in the past and reconstruct more background from them than was ever consciously, purposefully noted. Does it mean anything, or do we gain a greater understanding of the work, or Van Gogh himself, or even what was happening in St-R\u00e9my? Not really – this is far more trivia than anything else, though it may help pin down when his seizures actually began. At the same time, it provides more background for the painting than most interpretations, with far more supporting evidence, so take from that what you wish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve said before that there’s only so far I get into ‘art,’ both in my own work and with appreciating the work of others. Aesthetically, I’m all for it, and am far more entranced by anyone that can handle realism than I am over particular styles and genres, and in line with that, I’m not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,12,9,46],"tags":[986,8950,8954,8953,8951,8952,8955,8948,8949],"class_list":["post-42947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-random","category-science","category-too-cool","tag-art","tag-elijah-jeong-hyun-kim","tag-ho-jin","tag-jungwoo-song","tag-kyung-hee-university-school-of-space-research","tag-suna-kang","tag-the-actual-sky-of-van-goghs-starry-night-a-multidisciplinary-reconstruction","tag-the-starry-night","tag-vincent-van-gogh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42952,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42947\/revisions\/42952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}