Studies rebut claims of turbulence in van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’

Cameron Thompson

(CN) — A September 2024 study that Courthouse News reported on at the time proposed that Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting “The Starry Night” accurately depicts air turbulence in the night sky. But multiple newer studies have since refuted the original study’s claims, methodology and evidence.

The original study, published in Physics of Fluids in September 2024 by researchers in China and France, analyzed a high-resolution digital scan of a van Gogh painting and claimed its brushstroke brightness followed mathematical laws of turbulence identified in 1941 and 1959.

In December 2025, authors of two independent studies disputing those findings published a joint commentary letter in the same journal, summarizing a year of work challenging the original conclusions.

“We find from each of the arguments given above that the analysis in the paper by Ma et al. is flawed, and their conclusions unfounded,” the authors wrote in the conclusion of their commentary letter. “Moreover, we are concerned that the publication of such unfounded claims may encourage a cascade of further speculative studies that build on a flawed premise. We believe it is important to address these misconceptions now, before more time and resources are invested in fundamentally misguided directions.”

James J. Riley of the University of Washington and Mohamed Gad-el-Hak of Virginia Commonwealth University published their study in March 2025 that flatly rejected the original findings.

In August 2025, a separate team led by Daniel Bourgault and Cédric Chavanne of the University of Quebec Rimouski’s Institut des sciences de la mer released its own analysis, citing Riley and Gad-el-Hak and raising “additional concerns in a candid and playful spirit, directed at a broader audience.”

Among their criticisms, Bourgault and his coauthors said van Gogh’s own writings undercut the original study’s conclusions.

“According to van Gogh himself,” Bourgault, the corresponding author of the commentary, wrote, “the bright circular region in the bottom left of the painting, to the right of the cypress trees, was a depiction of the planet Venus, not an eddy. Furthermore, Venus is rendered as a large glowing disk, whereas in reality it appears as a tiny point of bright light in the night sky. Similarly, the moon in the upper right is portrayed in a dramatically exaggerated fashion. Both of these artistic elements would distort the energy spectrum derived from the image compared to that of a real geophysical fluid.”

Bourgault’s study added another key rebuttal, arguing that “The Starry Night” appearing to fit the turbulence model used in the original paper was simply coincidence.

In technical terms, the pixel intensity graph used in the original analysis yielded a slope close to −5/3, the value required by the large-scale turbulence model.

Bourgault, the study’s corresponding author, said that “the fact that fully developed turbulent flows exhibit a −5/3 power spectrum does not imply that any field with a −5/3 spectrum is turbulent. All roses are flowers, but not all flowers are roses.”

To show the −5/3 result was coincidental, Bourgault’s team applied the same analysis used in the 2024 study to Edgar Degas’ “A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers,” an indoor scene unrelated to skies or fluid motion. The method again produced a slope near −5/3.

Bourgault concluded that if van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” is deemed turbulent based solely on that slope, then Degas’ painting would also have to depict turbulence, despite having nothing to do with it.

Bourgault also gave an extended interview to the French-language publication Le Devoir in late October.

“Out of intellectual responsibility, I couldn’t let this go,” Bourgault told Le Devoir about his thoughts after reading the initial study and after Physics of Fluids twice rejected his comments on the study.

Bourgault also spoke at length to Le Devoir on how the general public reacted to the initial study. In both the commentary letter to the journal and the Le Devoir interview, he highlighted how a Wikipedia user had added van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” to the encyclopedia’s article on turbulence shortly after the original study’s publication. After the two newer studies were published in 2025, another user removed the van Gogh reference from the turbulence entry.