Two quite similar articles caught my attention recently, both involving astronomy and art. The first is a Guardian editorial about Texas physicist Donald Olson.
Olson has made attempts to date and place several paintings using astronomical knowledge. This editorial mentions several, among them Vincent van Gogh’s painting White House at Night which shows a big yellow star or planet in the evening sky above a white house. It had been known that the painting was finished before 17th June 1890 - Van Gogh wrote a letter about it then - but the exact date wasn’t known. So Olson and his collaborator set out to find it. They tracked down the house and used it to orient the picture so they could place the object on the sky. They reckon it’s Venus, which was visible in that part of the sky around that time.
White House at Night
Having identified the planet, they then used a computer program which follows planets’ orbits and worked out that to be in exactly that spot on the sky the painting must have been done at about 8:00pm on 16th June. Now, at this point I start to get a little sceptical. I don’t doubt that they can place the planet accurately enough to get that timing (planets can actually wander about the sky fairly quickly), but how accurately did Van Gogh do it? If Venus happened to be close to the edge of the house, or too far to fit on the picture, mightn’t he have adjusted its position? Or even if he didn’t do so deliberately, would he have taken enough care about its position for us to rely on the dating?
It’s certainly an interesting method and I’d like to think that it had worked. And in fact things aren’t quite as bad as they might seem: if Van Gogh had moved Venus to some parts of his sky it would have ended up in a position which was never right during the month or two before the 17th. But still, I’m not sure quite how much reliance can be placed in the exact figure.
Edvard Munch's The Scream, with reddening perhaps caused by volcanic dust
Olsen has also suggested that the deep red sky in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream was inspired by the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883. The eruption famously caused red sunsets across the world by filling the atmosphere with dust which scatters long-wavelength red light more easily than shorter wavelengths, thereby ’spreading’ the red bits of the Sun’s light around the sky. Astronomers in many countries remarked on the effect at the time.
Using the viewpoint of the painting, and another in an early sketch for it, Olson also proposed an exact spot for the scene - which indeed faces in what would have been the correct direction to see the volcano’s ejecta.
Again there’s the question of how much liberty Munch may have taken in the elements of his picture - especially since he was fairly impressionistic as a painter. But this case is, to me, rather more convincing: we know that the painting was inspired by an actual event, which had a great impact on Munch and about which he wrote several times.
I was walking along the road with two friends—then the Sun set—all at once the sky became blood red—and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired—clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on, and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.
Evidently he was an evocative writer as well as painter!
It seems plausible if not certain that he was talking about an especially red sky and not just a normal sunset. And both the viewpoint and the known date of the painting seem to agree perfectly with the volcano. Since in this case we’re less susceptible to a slight repositioning of a small part of the picture, I’m pretty optimistic about Olson’s deduction.
I mentioned a second article, also about a connection between astronomy and paintings, but with a slightly different focus. I’ll write about that - along with some of my thoughts on this theme in general - in another post soon.
Update: since soon has become now, here’s the promised second part: The earliest painting of a telescope.
[...] Thanks To Cosmic Web blogger Olaf Davis for contributing to this week’s Carnival! Olaf’s very enjoyable post – looking at portrayals of astronomical subjects in art – got lost in the cyber-ether somewhere, so I’m happy to be able to add it here… [...]