DEPICTIONS OF A LUNAR ECLIPSE AND THE DAWN OF ASTROPHYSICS IN VAN GOGH’S PAINTINGS

When visiting the Museum of Modern Art’s special exhibit “van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” (New York, USA, 2008) I was impressed by the artist’s effort to paint and write about landscapes and life scenes at night. At the same time a clear contrast emerged between the colorful <italic>Starry Night</italic> painting and the darkness or twilight in his earlier productions. Since then, while revisiting van Gogh’s paintings and reading his letters, I have come to the conclusion that his later work was not only driven by the poetry of the night but also by his awareness of the dawn of astrophysics in the nineteenth century. A change in the way the artist conceived the sky after his stay in Paris is evident, with the skies becoming more dynamic and rich in colors. In this paper I present and discuss elements in van Gogh’s masterpieces that refer to astronomical events visible from France in 1889 and 1890, such as a lunar eclipse and planetary conjunctions. I analyze emergent astrophysical concepts that may have inspired the depiction on canvas of stars with different structures and colors, as well as the large central swirl in the <italic>Starry Night</italic> painting. The general impression is that the artist had a fascination with and a profound attention to celestial phenomena, in addition to some knowledge of new wonders and discoveries of astrophysics in the nineteenth century.