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Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: History and Analysis of the First Series of Sunflowers (August 1888)

Painted in about a week in late August 1888, Van Gogh’s original series of Sunflowers was conceived as an inspirational and decorative piece for his “yellow house” in Arles, France. In preparation for the arrival of the painter Paul Gauguin later in the year, Van Gogh wanted his house and his paintings to reflect the mysterious and extra-luminous color palette he found in the surrounding countryside of Arles and the Mediterranean Sea:

“The Mediterranean has the colors of mackerel, I mean changing. You don’t always know if it’s green or violet, you can’t even tell it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has turned pink or grey… Everywhere now there’s old gold, bronze, copper, you could say, and that with the bluish green of the sky, bleached by heat: a delicious color, extraordinarily harmonious, with the mixed tones of Delacroix”. [Excerpt from letters to Theo]

Upon his arrival in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh was immediately inspired and struck by the intensity of color found in the south of France. Unlike the sky and landscape of northern Europe with its clouds and mist, the blazing sun and bright sky of the south seem to have banished all hesitation from Van Gogh’s paintings. Bold color contrasts and spiraling rhythms, all inspired by the surroundings of Arles, began to flow endlessly, as if in a state of sustained ecstasy. Finishing almost a canvas a day and writing hundreds of letters, 1888 saw Van Gogh paint at a breakneck pace, achieving insane speed and production quality virtually unmatched in art history.

Sunflowers as a gift of gratitude

As most of Van Gogh’s paintings had been executed with no one in particular in mind, his planned series of sunflowers was a slight departure in that it was intended as a gift and an expression of friendship. While many of his paintings seem to draw him in and out to the horizon, drawing him in to his vision and world, Van Gogh’s sunflowers seem to reach outside and communicate with you; it’s like you can touch them. These are paintings that were clearly intended to enchant and comfort, and are possibly the most impressive because the intended viewer of these paintings was another artist that Van Gogh greatly admired – he knew that anything less than magnificence would not impress Gauguin.

painting the sunflowers

When Gauguin finally confirmed that he would be heading to Arles (after a long delay), Van Gogh’s sadness and apprehension completely dissipated. With almost gustatory enthusiasm, he launched into the sunflower project. He had expanded in his mind from six to twelve canvases that would constitute a ‘symphony in blue and yellow’, affective like music, by virtue of their color and ‘simple technique’, understandable to anyone with eyes in their heads. Racing to complete his canvases before the flowers withered, Vincent worked feverishly from sunrise to sunset, completing four of the planned twelve. He first made, in quick succession, two canvases with fewer than half a dozen flowers, alongside a composition of “twelve sunflowers and buds” (in fact, there are more) arranged in a yellow earthenware box on a pale blue-green background. . Having completed this exploration of light against light, he painted a contrasting pendant of the same size and with the same yellow vase, but ‘all in yellow’, the yellow sunflowers set against a yellow background.

By ‘simple technique’ Vincent meant a way that was free from the fussy stippling of pointillism. And indeed, the procedure on these canvases represents his final negation of Neo-Impressionism. He began in the usual way, establishing the composition with a drawn outline sketch, reinforced it with painted lines, and blocked out the background and primary forms with thin layers of paint. Then he picked up speed, sometimes loading the brush with color and in other places using little paint. He did not hesitate to use unmixed color straight from the tube and often combined pigments incompletely in his palette, so that separate streaks of color run through individual strokes.

Vincent devised different systems of brush strokes for each element of the painting: the background is a basket weave pattern; the table, a series of loose horizontal lines; petals on individual flowers and leaves are formed by single or small parallel markings; the centers of these flowers are painted with circular strokes of pure lake red, punctuated with a ring of yellow impasto; the petals of full double flowers are short, thick strokes radiating from thinner centers. Having kept the general shape of most of the flowers in reserve by applying an initial ground coat, he added petal tips on top of the final ground. Applying new pigment to the still-wet underlying or adjacent area with a confident, controlled touch, Vincent probably spent only one session on each canvas, then reinforced some contours and added his signature.

Van Gogh’s series of sunflowers, first viewed in a spirit of solitude, now celebrated Vincent’s “hope to live with Gauguin in a studio of his own”, while hinting at a growing sense of mission. Gauguin, for his part, expressed his willingness to participate in his friend’s plan, but by no means did he feel the same mixture of personal and ideological longing.

Utilizing late 19th century innovations in paint making, throughout 1888 Van Gogh had been using bold, unmixed colors to startling effect. Chrome yellow, citron yellow, zinc yellow, cadmium, straw yellow, cobalt blue, French ultramarine, viridean, and emerald green feature prominently in Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and in his later work in general. Using the strong literal, visual, and vibrational contrasts between colors, Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings harness the full potential of intense color combined with an undulating, spiraling sense of rhythm.

An analysis of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers reveals the convergence of many surface and ulterior themes within the artist’s life: his affinity for the color yellow, his insistence on speed, his focused intensity when dealing with certain objects and people, and his obvious affinity for the sunflower as his ‘power flower’, so to speak:

“As you know, the peonies are Jeannin’s, the hollyhocks are Quost’s, and the sunflowers, well, the sunflowers are mine.”

Additionally, one of the only paintings Paul Gauguin completed while visiting Van Gogh in Arles was his portrait Vincent Painting Sunflowers (see section on Gauguin below), which succeeds in capturing Van Gogh’s quiet intensity when it came to depicting his subjects. and landscapes.

in love with yellow

Regarding Vincent Van Gogh’s affinity for the color yellow, it’s hard not to draw this conclusion from a man who paints arguably the ‘yellowish’ representation of sunflowers in human history while renting a yellow house and painting hundreds of representations. of cornfields, wheatfields, and of course, the wildly gold, biblically tinted The sower from earlier in the same year. In a letter to his sister Wilemina, Van Gogh described still lifes of sunflowers as “paintings all in yellow.” Perhaps foreshadowing Picasso’s blue period in which the artist drastically reduced his color palette to startling results, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are in fact a wild and lively “symphony in yellow” combining a dozen or more hues and shades of yellow in a singular fusion.

Painting ‘In the moment’

When it came to speed, Van Gogh not only painted at a breakneck pace, he needed to paint as fast as nature itself to capture the wind, the sun, the trees, and of course the sunflowers:

“I propose to paint a series of pictures for the studio in the hope of living there together with Gauguin. Nothing but a bunch of big sunflowers… If I carry out my plan, there will be a dozen pictures. The whole is a symphony in blue and yellow. I start work every day at dawn because the flowers wilt very quickly and you have to paint it all at once.”

This method of painting ‘in one go’ not only increased the output of his paintings during the last years of his life, but added to the focus, intensity, and singular expression that many of his paintings exude. Waves, rivers, spirals and swirls of color seem to flow spontaneously in the moment and in harmony with the rhythms of a much larger and grander universe that lurks just below the most ordinary objects.

Gauguin’s ‘Sunflower Painter’

With The Sunflower Painter, Gauguin depicted the arrangement of sunflowers that Vincent paints in the manner of Van Gogh’s own August Sunflower series. The two full flower heads (called doubles) are placed similarly to those in the yellow-on-yellow version, and the top flower on Gauguin’s canvas corresponds to the disheveled one on the top left in Vincent. Gauguin followed Vincent in greatly strengthening the contours of the stripes and also in the use of dark red layers on the central discs. This method on Gauguin’s canvas could allude to his criticism of Vincent for simply transcribing the Sunflowers and even applying paint to the sunflowers themselves.

The Sunflower Painter it illustrates Gauguin’s criticism of Vincent’s work habits and limitations, along the lines of the broader indictment he would later add to one of his depictions of his time with Vincent. Looking back, Gauguin would claim that while 19th-century artists had mastered drawing as a language of direct communication, none—not even Delacroix—had truly understood the expressive potential of color.

Vincent’s overall depiction, however, is fictional: Van Gogh couldn’t have been painting real sunflowers in December, because they weren’t in season. By depicting the still life in the manner of Vincent, Gauguin implied that neither he nor Vincent directly observed the motif, but saw it already transformed by the latter’s imagination. In other words, they worked with reference to previous Sunflower canvases, not actual sunflowers.

Giving Vincent a trance-like rapt expression, Gauguin accomplished something more complex than caricature or ridicule. He and Vincent evidently pondered the creative potential of the state between wakefulness and sleep. Here Gauguin blurs the line between Van Gogh ‘seeing God’ in this trance state and being caught in a kind of accidental beginner’s stupor, although many would consider these to be harmonious states. Vincent would later comment on the painting and its resemblance to the image of him: “It is certainly me, but I have gone mad.”

The Lost Sunflower Painting (Second Version)

Painted in the same time period as the other three sunflower paintings mentioned above, this Van Gogh painting was considered the ‘Six Sunflowers’ and was meant to be placed within an orange frame. Once owned by Koyata Yamamoto, a wealthy Japanese art collector, the painting was destroyed along with the owner’s home on August 6, 1945, the same day the United States bombed Hiroshima.

Although the painting did not fall victim to the nuclear bomb, it was hanging above a sofa in the man’s seaside home in Osaka when the town was destroyed in a US bombing raid the same day. Nearly seven decades later, in 2013, British art historian and curator Martin Bailey found a color photograph of the painting hidden in a collection of Cezanne prints while researching a book on Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

Overall Van Gogh Sunflower Paintings they continue to fascinate both the casual viewer and art historians. Even 125 years after the completion of these four paintings, they continue to surprise and delight us.