Great Paintings Explained: Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent’s floral vision for his studio in the south
In August of 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his friend, the Post-Impressionist artist Émile Bernard, with the idea that he was going to decorate his house with paintings of sunflowers:
“I’m thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of Sunflowers. A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various blue backgrounds, from the palest Veronese to royal blue…
(Letter to Émile Bernard. Arles, on or about Tuesday, 21 August 1888.)
In Arles in the south of France, Van Gogh had made his home in the “Yellow House” on the Place de la Cavalerie. It was here that he painted some of his most recognisable and indicative works of art. He painted the town’s night cafés with their prostitutes and lost bohemians. And it was in Arles that the stars rained out of the night skies like comets.
By the time he wrote to Émile Bernard in August of 1888, it seems Van Gogh’s project to paint sunflowers to adorn his studio walls was already underway. He expressed to his brother the following day:
“I’m painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won’t surprise you when it’s a question of painting large Sunflowers.”
(Letter to Theo van Gogh. Arles, Tuesday, 21 or Wednesday, 22 August 1888.)
In the same letter to his brother, Vincent then went on to explain his current painting endeavours:
“I have 3 canvases on the go […] I’ll probably not stop there.”
The series of sunflower paintings Van Gogh made at this time show an abundance of yellow flowers in a pottery vase. As his letters suggest, he made numerous renditions of the sunflowers in Arles. He made four larger sunflower paintings in August 1888 and three further replicas in January 1889, which he described as “absolutely equal and identical copies”.
Van Gogh painted the initial four versions in just one week. As the version above shows, Van Gogh allowed his impasto technique — thick strokes of paint — to dominate the painting. Notice how the pale blue background is produced by a clearly visible cross-hatch of vertical and horizontal marks.
The sunflowers themselves are painted in tones of mustard yellow, brown and green. They are shown in different stages of their life cycle, from young bud through to full maturity, to wilted decay.
What has always fascinated me about Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings is his preference for a more muted colour palette, when the petals of the sunflower in the height of summer are a vivid yellow.
In fact, he did paint a version with more lurid colouration: his first attempt (above left) displays three sunflower heads in full flaming yellow. This painting is less well-known than the later efforts because it resides in a private collection and has not been exhibited for decades.
Yet it seems Van Gogh was not entirely content with this brighter colour palette and turned instead to a narrower, more restrained range of tones to capture the flower. Van Gogh — an artist who was much drawn to the weathered aspects of life, whether they be manual labourers, poverty-stricken peasants or an old pair of boots — felt a stronger kinship with the sunflower in all its various stages of life and death.
He was obviously more pleased with the later works, since the final two were among the six works he chose to exhibit in Brussels in January 1890 at the annual exhibition of “Les XX”, a society of avant-garde painters where his work appeared alongside Toulouse Lautrec, Cezanne and Renoir. Participation in the annual event was for members and by invitation only and was an important milestone in Van Gogh’s growing reputation.
Sunflowers for the studio of the south
Around this time in his life, Van Gogh was growing in excitement about the prospective arrival of the artist Paul Gauguin in Arles. In late August, he wrote to his brother:
My dear Theo,
I’m writing to you in great haste, but to tell you that I’ve just received a line from Gauguin, who says that he hasn’t written because he was doing a great deal of work, but says he’s still ready to come to the south as soon as chance permits.
And later in the same letter:
In the hope of living in a studio of our own with Gauguin, I’d like to do a decoration for the studio. Nothing but large Sunflowers.
This was important news for Van Gogh, who had high hopes of attracting other artists to the south of France and setting up a creative community there — a “Studio in the South” — something that resembled the colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany where Gauguin and Bernard had already established themselves.
Van Gogh kept up a lively correspondence with Gauguin and Bernard, letters in which the artists shared opinions about other artists (“Ah, Rembrandt!” Van Gogh espoused in one) and also swapped sketches.
All through the summer of 1888, Van Gogh was impatient for Gauguin to arrive, and at various times considered Bernard as an alternative companion, or else abandoning Arles and relocating to Brittany himself.
Gauguin eventually arrived in Arles at the end of October. He already owned two earlier paintings by Van Gogh that depicted intimate sunflower heads, and it’s thought that part of Van Gogh’s wish to decorate his rooms with more sunflowers was to impress his new guest.
As these earlier works demonstrate (see image above), Van Gogh’s fascination with sunflowers began at least a year before he considered decorating his house in Arles. He painted four such paintings in 1887, showing the flowers in close-up lying on the ground, executed whilst he was living in Paris with Theo.
In the event of Gauguin’s arrival in Arles on 23rd October 1888, Van Gogh changed his mind about decorating his studio with sunflowers and instead hung two of the pictures — the Munich painting under discussion and the version that now hangs in the National Gallery, London — in the guest room in which Gauguin was staying.
During Gauguin’s stay in Arles, the two artists visited exhibitions, took trips together and painted portraits of each other (as Gauguin had previously done with Bernard).
Gauguin’s vision of Van Gogh depicts the Dutchman avidly at work on one of his sunflower paintings. It was an invented scene, since the flowers had long since stopped blooming and Vincent was no longer painting the flower, yet for Gauguin the motif of the sunflower was deeply resonant of his enthusiastic friend.
