To Be Precise

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VanGogh-starry_night_ballance1.jpg

On what date did Vincent van Gogh paint his 1889 masterpiece The Starry Night? Earlier studies had placed the creation in mid-June of that year, based on a letter the artist had written to his brother Theo around June 18. But Kyung Hee University doctoral candidate Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim noted that an observer in that period should have seen a waning gibbous moon, not the crescent seen in the painting.

Intrigued, he began to compare astronomical simulations, weather records, and van Gogh’s other writings. A better estimate of the scene’s creation, he says, is dawn on July 22, 1889. On that date the crescent moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus would have been visible from van Gogh’s window in southern France, and the recorded hot weather would have inspired the cicadas the artist mentions in a letter.

Kim’s article appears in the journal Scientific Reports. “Our conversation with Van Gogh’s other skies is still ongoing,” he told Popular Science. “We plan to tell those stories one by one.”

(Texas State University “forensic astronomer” Donald W. Olson has done similar work, estimating for example that the scene below depicts Le Havre harbor as seen from Claude Monet’s hotel room at 7:35 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1872.) (Thanks, Sharon.)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet,_Impression,_soleil_levant.jpg

| Art · Science & Math

Smile

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elephantselfie_with_Christian_LeBlanc.jpg

When 22-year-old student Christian LeBlanc fed a basket of bananas to a group of elephants on the Thai island of Koh Phangan in 2015, one of them seized his GoPro camera by its mount, and when the self-timer triggered the shutter he got “the worlds first ever Elfie.”

“Elephants are incredibly intelligent and it definitely makes you wonder if it was a conscious action,” he wrote. So who gets the credit? For now, in the judgment of Wikimedia, “This file is in the public domain because, as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.”

| Technology

False Prospect

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mountain_Landscape_with_Bridge_A30099.jpg

Because he had to earn a living painting portraits, Thomas Gainsborough could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked. So he arranged pieces of moss, rock, vegetables, and mirror into tabletop “landscapes” that he could paint at night by candlelight.

Joshua Reynolds recalled him collecting “broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.” Another visitor wrote, “I … have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models … for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table. … He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of moss and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.”

| Art

A Late Addition

Holst’s The Planets premiered in 1918, 12 years before Pluto was discovered.

So in 2000 Colin Matthews wrote an eighth movement, “Pluto, the Renewer,” to complete the cycle.

(I’m not sure of its status since 2006, when the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto a dwarf planet.)

| Art · Science & Math

Criticism

The library of St John’s College, Oxford, used to hold a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that bore a student’s penciled comment on the last page:

“First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.”

It had been written by Philip Larkin, who had studied English there in the 1940s.

| Literature

Relativity

Fixed to the front of the clock case in the north transept of Chester Cathedral is a poem by Henry Twells (1823–1900):

When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full grown man,
Time RAN.
When older still I daily grew,
Time FLEW.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.
O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then?
Amen.

He called it “Time’s Paces.”

| Poems

Two for One

The plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the meter of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, by Martin Woodhead:

You shall hear how Lady Constance,
Tiring of her wounded husband
(Poor Sir Clifford, high war-hero,
Inconvenienced by shrapnel),
Found a gamekeeper called Mellors
Who would teach her in his lunch-hour
(And in language frank and fearless
Such as wives and servants blush at)
To admire the lower orders
While that blighted Bart, Sir Clifford
(Let us waste no pity on him,
For the man was paraplegic),
In his new electric wheelchair
Tried to drive it up a tunock —
Tried and tried, and couldn’t make it.

From a Spectator competition. Chatterley in Field & Stream. Hiawatha in condensed matter physics.

| Literature