Sunday

Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, 1888.

You’ve seen Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers a gazillion times before, forever. We all have - on a t-shirt, a keyring, a coaster, a mug, a tote bag, a mousepad, a teapot or oven gloves. But aside from the fact that I thought of them because it’s peak sunflowers in my garden at the moment, I wanted to make a point about over-familiarity, and the eye-rolling way in which we often dismiss something amazing because we feel we’ve seen too many times. (This applies to art and everything else, from fashion to people - it’s that intersection between love and contempt: very nice, I’m yawning, give me something new).

But if you’d never come across any of the Sunflowers series before, you’d charge across the museum floor thinking, ‘Oh my God, WHAT IS THAT? Who did that?!’. You’d stare at it for hours. You’d feel electrified by it. And with good reason. Look at it! It’s incredible. The flowers are represented at every stage of their existence. So you have life, reproduction, decay and death, in a pot, in those colours, with those textures and that light. It’s a painting about sunflowers, and also a painting about everything. Re. the colours: this is 1888. No one else is painting like that. And of course sunflowers symbolise the sun in all its glory, emphasised here by the turquoise sky-like background.

The painting is a masterpiece on its own, but the context is fascinating too. Van Gogh had been living in Paris for a couple of years but in May 1888 he went south, in search of colour and that golden Provençal light.

The idea was to go Arles and then head to Marseille, but he liked Arles and stayed put, taking part of a house there (this one). He rented four rooms, with the idea of creating a mini artists’ colony, and set enthusiastically to work. He wrote to his brother Theo: ‘I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when you know that where I'm at is the painting of some big sunflowers’.

Van Gogh loved and admired Paul Gauguin, whose use of intense colour was also groundbreaking - Theo had already bought some of his work - and invited him to come and stay at the house in Arles. They would paint together. Vincent was galvanised by the idea of Gauguin’s company ('You know I’ve always thought it ridiculous for painters to live alone &c. You always lose when you’re isolated,’ he wrote to Theo). Gauguin had bought two of the earlier, smaller, cut sunflower paintings that Van Gogh had made the previous year in Paris, and Vincent was so pleased both by this and by his friend’s arrival that he decorated Gauguin’s room with more sunflowers to make it lovely for him.

Eventually - it took a fair bit of prodding - Gauguin said a not entirely full-throated yes to the invitation, and turned up in Arles in the October of that year, so five months after first being asked. (It is possible that part of his saying yes was to make Theo happy - Theo was a successful art dealer - though to be fair to Gauguin, maybe he took so long to agree to come to Arles because Vincent was a bit intense).

He stayed for two creatively ultra-productive months. Domestically, life had its ups and downs. Vincent had little money, was messy and didn’t tidy up after himself, Gauguin later said (rather whinily). They drank a lot of absinthe. They bickered. Vincent was not always mentally robust.

One night Vincent and Gauguin had a blazing row. Gauguin often painted from memory and imagination - here is his 1888 portrait of Van Gogh in Arles, with an imagined background. Vincent passionately believed in the importance of painting true things, from life. This - reality vs making stuff up - was the subject of the row, during which Gauguin said that Vincent threatened him with a razor. Gauguin left, and later that night Vincent cut off part of his ear, wrapped it in newspaper and took it to a prostitute he knew called Rachel. Then he went to bed. Gauguin had alerted the authorities before leaving Arles for good, so the police turned up in the morning and took Vincent to hospital, where he stayed until January of the following year.

Van Gogh and Gauguin later corresponded intermittently, but never saw each other again.

Vincent continued painting once he got out, and when his mental health became fragile again, he pre-emptively checked himself in to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy. It had a garden, and the hospital gave him an extra room to use as a studio. He was there for a year, during which time he produced 150 paintings, including Almond Blossom.

He left in May 1890 and went to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he continued to paint and, despite Theo’s reassurances, constantly fretted about money. His mental state was precarious. On 27 July, he walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. He died of his injuries two days later, his brother by his side. He was 37.

In 1901, by now living in Tahiti, Paul Gauguin painted Still Life with Sunflowers on an Armchair. I don’t think it’s wildly fanciful to imagine the painting was perhaps a tribute to, or lament for, his sometime friend.

Van Gogh’s (gripping) letters are all online.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is fantastic (book your ticket online ahead of tuning up, though) and its website is a mine of information. However:

From next month until January 2025, the National Gallery in London will show Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, which it describes as a ‘once-in-a-century’ exhibition of the very works Van Gogh painted in the south of France, including two Sunflowers and many paintings on loan from various museums around the world. Advance tickets here.

Thank you for stopping by! These (usually) short fortnightly picture posts are free to read. They alternate with my food posts, which are also free. For everything else, you need a paid subscription. Either way, have a wonderful Sunday and if you enjoyed this post then do please super kindly hit the ❤️ button - it makes it more visible to non-subscribers. Thank you!

PS if you’re in the UK and have a sub to The Sunday Times, I interviewed Delia Smith for today’s paper - it’s the 50th anniversary of the bestseller list and we did a big thing on the top 100 over all that time. She’s at numbers 3, 7 and 15 👑 🙌🏽. (If you’re not in the UK, Delia Smith is our Julia Child, sort of).