A decoration for a friend
Gauguin’s expected visit prompted the series. Van Gogh planned the canvases for a shared studio in Arles, hoping it would become the beginning of an artists’ collective.
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Sunflowers
Vincent van Gogh · 1888
painting
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In its time
1888
Books from this period
Where it hangs
National Gallery
Van Gogh painted these sunflowers in August 1888 as Gauguin’s arrival in Arles approached. He planned them as decoration for a shared studio, hoping the visit would begin an artists’ collective. He described the scheme as a symphony in blue and yellow.
Details
The flowers occupy different stages of growth: buds share the vase with open blooms and seed heads. Compare their forms individually; the still life brings several moments of a flower’s life into one arrangement.
In context
Into the guest room
Van Gogh hung this canvas and its companion in the guest room he prepared for Gauguin at the Yellow House, rather than keeping them for himself.
A pair for the Berceuse
The sunflowers were not meant to stand alone. Van Gogh planned them as wings on either side of his portraits of Augustine Roulin, the postman's wife, painted in her role as La Berceuse.
After the break
The friendship did not survive the winter. In December a crisis broke apart their shared time in Arles and Gauguin returned to Paris; the two never met again, though they kept writing, and Gauguin still wanted one of the sunflower canvases for himself.
Yellow, and a debt to Monticelli
For Van Gogh, yellow was the colour of Provence itself, and a tribute to the painter Monticelli, whose work he owned and weighed, in his own letters, alongside his sunflowers.
The story
1888. Working at speed that August, Van Gogh joked he had the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse as he raced through the sunflower panels.
Before his friend Paul Gauguin arrived, Van Gogh dreamed of a shared studio, even a whole artists' collective in the south, and told Theo he wanted the walls hung with nothing but large Sunflowers.
He pictured the finished decoration as one symphony in blue and yellow, and hung this canvas, with its companion, in the guest room he had prepared for his friend.
December. A crisis broke the two friends apart, and Gauguin returned to Paris. They never met again, though the letters kept coming.
Even so, Gauguin still wanted one of the two sunflower canvases, and Van Gogh, knowing how much his friend loved them, set about painting the one he wanted all over again.
A symphony in blue and yellow
Van Gogh described the planned decoration as a symphony in blue and yellow. The phrase concerns the relationship between panels as well as the colours within a single canvas.