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Canvas Venus dates Van Gogh painting
08/03/2001 14:14 - (SA)
Paris - Astronomers have pinpointed the day when Vincent van Gogh painted
one of his canvases thanks to the position of the planet Venus in
the tableau.
The White House at Night, which hangs in St Petersburg's
Hermitage Museum, shows a house at twilight with a prominent star
with a yellow halo in the sky.
Astronomers at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos
calculated that the star is Venus, which was bright in the evening
sky in June 1890, when Van Gogh is believed to have painted the
picture, the British weekly New Scientist reports in next
Saturday's issue.
They then organised a field trip to the small town of
Auvers-sur-Oise, north-west of Paris, and located the white house
itself, thus enabling them to work out the position from where Van
Gogh made the painting.
The researchers, Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, say the canvas
was painted from the bottom up during the course of an afternoon
and early evening.
"You can see it's about 19:00 from the sunlight on the house, but
as the sun sets, Venus becomes bright and obvious," said Doescher,
who added that he was astonished by the accuracy of the star's
position in the picture.
Using computer programmes, the astronomers calculated that Venus
was in the position shown in the painting at around 20:00 on June
16, 1890 - just six weeks before the artist killed himself.
The White House at Nigh has a history almost as turbulent as Van
Gogh's. It was hidden from Nazi looters and only re-emerged in
Russia in 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Last November, Cambridge University scientist Kate Spence gave a
remarkably accurate estimate of when the Great Pyramids were made,
based on the position of stars in two prominent constellations
believed to have been used by the architects to line up the
structures.
She said work on the Great Pyramid of Cheops began between 2485 and
2475 BC. Eight other Egyptian pyramids were built between 2600 and
2400 BC, but their alignments are somewhat different from that of
Cheops because of the steady drift of the stars, according to
Spence. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA
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