One of the most famous paintings in the world may be a month younger than art history has long believed. A study published on 22 October in the journal Scientific Reports challenges the accepted dating of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, suggesting the artist drew on a July 1889 sky rather than the June 1889 one generations of scholars have taken for granted.

The researchers, a South Korean team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim with colleagues Suna Kang, Jungwoo Song and Ho Jin, argue that several features of the swirling nocturne clash with what the June sky actually showed. Combining star-position analysis, period weather modelling, Van Gogh's letters and other lines of evidence, they found the painted heavens match the arrangement of a specific night a month later. Earlier astronomical readings, they write, were boxed in by the conventional dating and produced contradictory results, while the picture's star field had never been tested quantitatively.

The accepted timeline places the painting weeks into the Dutch master's year-long stay at the asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, not long after his rupture with Paul Gauguin. The view through his window there is believed to have seeded the composition, now a centrepiece of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The team is careful to frame the finding as a call for re-examination rather than a verdict. Even so, moving the date of one of modern art's canonical images by a full month would ripple through Van Gogh scholarship, where the chronology of the asylum period is tightly tied to the evolution of his late style.