Van+Gogh+Moonlight

Van Gogh Moonlight 13th July 1889 21.08 hr  The Dutch artist created the masterpiece the night of July 13, 1889, while watching a nearly full moon rise over a hill exactly at 9:08 p.m. local time, according to astronomer Donald Olson and colleagues. At that moment, "the scene in front of van Gogh looked almost exactly like that painting," the Southwest Texas State University physics professor said. Olson and fellow Southwest professors Marilynn Olson, his wife, and Russell Doescher pieced together a variety of clues: notes from the artist, lunar table calculations and personal excursions to identify and analyze the location in France depicted in the work. Letters to van Gogh's brother Theo narrowed the possible range to the summer months of 1889. The work itself, painted near a monastery in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France, offered enough hints to figure out about where van Gogh set up his easel: an unusual double house beside a hill, an intersecting wall and clumps of harvested wheat. Van Gogh was known to have painted by direct observation, not memory. And a peculiar ridge that obscures a portion of the rising moon serves as the de facto smoking gun to calculate the moment recorded in the painting. "There is no wiggle room at all on the time," Olson said. "The night before and after it would not align with the cliff. We can absolutely tell which date it is."