Van Gogh's Sunflowers

Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed, August--October 1887, Vincent van Gogh

Have you ever noticed that some artists often paint the same subject again and again sometimes in nearly identical versions? There are probably several different reasons for this but usually it's because they've found a subject that sells and therefore want to "milk" it for all it's worth. I must confess that I've been guilty of doing this. Years ago when I was still doing art fairs I found the small paintings of cats (especially kittens) were moving at a very gratifying pace. At times, it was hard to keep a half-dozen or so of them in stock. Likewise I once painted three identical rural farmhouse sunsets but in three different formats--square, horizontal, and vertical. All three sold almost before the paint was dry. Monet had his waterlilies; Degas, his ballerinas; Renoir, his bathers; and van Gogh his sunflowers. I don't know about the others but van Gogh's many sunflower paintings had nothing at all to do with their sales. Their story is a bit more complicated than that. So, what was behind van Gogh's near obsession with these towering giants?



Painter of Sunflowers (left) by Paul Gauguin, and
Portrait of Gauguin (right), December, 1888, by van Gogh.

Most artists in painting flowers like to depict them neatly arranged at their peak of perfection. But, as Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed (top, painted between August and October of 1887) suggests, van Gogh's fascination with this subject seems to indicate a much deeper involvement. In late 1887, as a struggling artist living in Paris, Vincent hung dozens of paintings on the walls of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant du Chalet in Paris. Above the long tables where low-income Parisians went to eat from a simple, set menu, works by Van Gogh, as well as those of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and other avant-garde artists decorated the establishment. The makeshift hanging was short-lived and received little fanfare. According to Bernard, Van Gogh quarreled with the owner and eventually loaded all his paintings onto a hand cart and took off. However, the exhibition had made a mark on one painter, at least. When Paul Gauguin came to look at the works, his eyes were drawn to a few of Van Gogh’s oil studies, especially, his close-up still-lifes of sunflower heads, their wide seed-cores velvety-looking in texture and their crowns of wilted petals like dancing flames. He requested two of the paintings. Van Gogh traded them for a single work by his Symbolist colleague.

 

The Yellow House, 1888, Vincent van Gogh



The street corner in Arles today where
once stood Van Gogh's rented yellow house.
It was destroyed by
bombing during WW II.

From this little episode, we might gather that van Gogh was so starved for the attention and respect of his fellow artists that even the slightest indication of admiration was enough to set his hand to painting between seven and eleven different sunflower paint-ings (depend-ing upon the source). However, there was more to it than one artist's critical approval of his work. Albeit some of them were intended to impress Gau-guin, while others van Gogh painted to adorn his bedroom in the Yellow House in Arles (above). There the two artists spent two months together in the fall of 1888. Van Gogh hoped to start an artists colony in Arles along with his newfound friend.

Gauguin eventually accepted van Gogh's invitation after funding for transportation and expenses was pro-vided by Vincent's brother, Theo van Gogh. However Gauguin only stayed for two months as the two often quarreled, climaxing with the famous incident in which van Gogh severed his left ear with a razor after an argument with Gauguin. What followed was a particularly dark period for the famously unstable artist. Van Gogh spent time in an asylum. During his stay in the hospital, he longed for the countryside of his upbringing in the rural Netherlands. The sunflower, which Van Gogh once saw as merely decorative, became something almost sacred, a symbol that represented light itself, an ideal of an honest life lived in nature. Van Gogh's paintings, he wrote to his sister in 1890, were “almost a cry of anguish while symbolizing gratitude in the rustic sunflowers,” an image that brought him comfort and familiarity. We might imagine, that they had a certain vital glow and form that could raise his spirits in troubled times.

Fourteen Sunflowers (left),  and Fifteen Sunflowers (right), 1888, Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh painted seven versions of his glorious sunflowers in a vase. One, the seventh in the series, was destroyed by a nuclear bomb in Japan during the war. They make up the most famous (and valuable) series of pictures in the history of art. In a staggering burst of creative energy, culminating in an agonizing mental breakdown, Vincent van Gogh produced a series of paintings of cut sunflowers in a vase. The pictures are now scattered to museums all over the world. One has gone unseen in public since 1948, residing the private collection of an unknown millionaire, revealed only to his closest friends. Five others are in museums in Philadelphia, London, Amsterdam, Munich, and Tokyo (the latter bought for a world-record £25-million in 1987).


Sunflowers Gone to Seed, 1887, watercolor study by Vincent van Gogh

There are a few things that are really striking about the sunflower paintings, especially the ones van Gogh did in Arles. First, his use of color is extraordinary. We don’t see traditional shading, but unmodulated, bright pigment. The colors in Van Gogh’s paintings seem to sing. Second, the way he rendered the sunflowers, table, and vase are quite innovative for their time. The “table” is basically a flat field of paint. The same thing is true with the vase, which has its roundness suggested, but not defined. Everything sits on the surface of the picture plane, rather than having the illusion of space that we see in traditional Western painting. Van Gogh was fascinated by Japanese art, and the way in which Japanese printmakers had a different conception of space in their art. He took this inspiration and developed his own, unique approach. Third, Van Gogh didn’t make physically flat paintings. He used paint as texture in some fascinating ways--both in the background and in the sunflowers themselves. The petals and other forms are articulated in a way that mimics their actual forms and gives them an amazing sense of vitality.


Detailed closeup of a van Gogh sunflower.
 

At the age of 35, van Gogh was less than two years from death. His career as an artist was an unmitigated failure, his excitement at painting mingled with disappointment, sadness and self-destructive mania. Before turning to painting, he had been an art dealer and teacher in England (in Brixton, Ramsgate and Isleworth), a bookseller in Holland, and a missionary in Belgium. Those around him despaired of his prospects almost as much as he despaired of them himself. In a letter, van Gogh angrily reported that his family wanted him to become a carpenter, accountant, or baker. In any case, the prospects of his being a world-famous artist seemed remote. His romantic life fared no better. When he proposed to the daughter of his Brixton landlady, she refused because she was already engaged to a former lodger.


Sunflowers, First Version,
Vincent van Gogh.
 

The second version.

Van Gogh painted seven versions of his glor-ious sunflowers in a vase. One, the seventh in the series, was destroyed by an Allied bomb in Japan. They make up the most famous (and valuable) series of pictures in the history of art. In a staggering burst of creative energy, culminating in an agonizing mental breakdown, Vincent van Gogh produced a series of paintings of cut sunflowers in a vase. The pictures are now scattered to museums all over the world. One, unseen in public since 1948, is in the private collection of an unknown millionaire, revealed only to his closest friends. Five others are in museums in Philadelphia, London, Amsterdam, Munich, and Tokyo (the latter bought for a world-record £25-million in 1987).


Sunflowers,  third version,
Vincent van Gogh

The fourth version

However, van Gogh didn’t just have an exceptional talent. He was also an astonishingly fast painter. The first four sunflower pictures were done in a week. But for all their golden, glowing colors, no one would buy them. Despairing, but not yet defeated, Van Gogh continued working at a furious rate through the autumn of 1888. He painted a self-portrait, a picture of fellow artist Paul Gauguin, who was with him at Arles at the time, and several famous pictures of empty chairs. Relations with Gauguin were stormy at best. Van Gogh was terrified his friend might desert him, leaving him alone with his demons in Arles. Then came the blow that sent him off the rails for good. Paul Gauguin departed for Paris.

Two Cut Sunflowers, 1887, Vincent van Gogh, though painted in Paris as much as two years earlier, they seem they seem quite in tune with van Gogh's mind upon Gauguin's departure.

Through a fog of madness, Van Gogh produced some of the most extraordinary paintings the world has ever seen. What is more remarkable still, is that these masterpieces came about quite by chance. One hot, breathless August day in Arles, the models Van Gogh had engaged to sit for him failed to turn up and it was too stifling to consider taking his easel outside. But through this struggle to maintain his sanity, Van Gogh produced some of the most extraordinary paintings the world has ever seen. So, with some peasant pots and dying sunflowers, Van Gogh produced seven paintings of astonishing brilliance.

Final version.