Van Gogh's Sunflowers: The Series That Built a Career
- Zocine Art
- Jul 7
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 25
There is not one Van Gogh Sunflowers painting. There are seven. Two of them are studies on a turquoise ground showing the flowers cut and lying on a table; the other five are bouquets in earthenware jugs against a yellow wall. They were painted between August 1888 and January 1889 in Arles in the south of France, in two intense bursts separated by the arrival and departure of Paul Gauguin.
Van Gogh thought of them as a decoration scheme. Not as paintings in the usual sense — not as objects to be sold one at a time — but as a series, intended to hang together on the walls of a small yellow house on the place Lamartine. He told his brother Theo, in a letter, that the room would have walls painted pale lavender, a red brick floor, and a dozen sunflowers in white frames. He had decided in advance how many sunflowers, what colour the frames would be, and which walls they would hang on.
The seven paintings
The first four were painted in a week, in August 1888, in Arles. Van Gogh wrote to his brother that he had set himself the task of doing one large sunflower painting per day, working from morning light, before the cut flowers wilted. He completed four canvases in that week: a small three-stem study, a six-stem jug, a twelve-stem jug, and a fourteen-stem jug. The last two — the twelve and the fourteen — are the paintings the world means when it says 'Van Gogh's Sunflowers.' The fourteen-stem on a yellow ground, made at the very end of the August week, is the one in most reproductions.
Three more followed. In January 1889, three months after Gauguin had arrived and weeks after he had left, Van Gogh painted three further versions — repetitions of the August twelves and fourteens — partly as gifts and partly as exercises. He wrote that he wanted to fix the technique while it was still fresh. The 1889 paintings are slightly looser, slightly more impasto-heavy, and slightly more saturated. The earlier 1888 versions remain the canonical ones.
The Yellow House
In May 1888, Van Gogh rented four rooms in a small house at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles. He painted the exterior yellow. He called it the Yellow House and he had ambitions for it. He wanted it to become a kind of studio-community for painters from the north of Europe who needed sun and cheap rent — a 'studio of the south.' He had been writing to Paul Gauguin for months trying to persuade him to come south and live there. Gauguin had been delaying.
The Sunflowers were the decoration for the room Gauguin would sleep in when he arrived. Van Gogh wrote to Theo that he wanted Gauguin to walk into a yellow room hung with yellow paintings of yellow flowers — a kind of compressed Provence in pictorial form. He painted them in August in anticipation of an arrival that was still uncertain. Gauguin finally came in October. He stayed nine weeks. The arrangement collapsed in late December in a famous breakdown that ended with Van Gogh in hospital and Gauguin on the train back to Paris.
The yellow that was new
Van Gogh painted the Sunflowers in chrome yellow — a pigment introduced commercially in the early nineteenth century, made from lead chromate, available in three intensities (chrome yellow light, chrome yellow medium, and chrome yellow dark). He used all three in the same painting, often in adjacent strokes. The petals are chrome yellow medium and dark, the wall behind the flowers is chrome yellow light. The earthenware jug at the centre is built from chrome yellow with admixtures of yellow ochre and a small amount of vermilion.
Chrome yellow oxidises over time. The Sunflowers paintings, restored and analysed in the last two decades, are visibly browner now than they were when Van Gogh painted them. The yellows have shifted toward a duller, more orange-brown register. The painting on the wall in 1888 was a fiercer, brighter object than the one we see in any museum today. The original look is reconstructable — restorers have made digital simulations — but the surface that exists is the one a hundred and thirty years of slow oxidation has left.
Gauguin, and the project that fell apart
Gauguin and Van Gogh argued constantly during the nine weeks they shared the Yellow House. They argued about technique (Van Gogh wanted to paint outdoors from life; Gauguin wanted to paint indoors from memory), about subject matter (Van Gogh wanted Arles; Gauguin missed Brittany), about colour, about religion, about money. Two days before Christmas 1888 Van Gogh, in a breakdown that may have been the onset of a long-running psychotic illness, cut off part of his own left ear. Gauguin left for Paris the next morning.
Van Gogh painted the second wave of Sunflowers a few weeks later, in the empty house. The exercise had a specific intention. He wrote to Theo that Gauguin had admired the August paintings particularly, and that he wanted to make copies — partly as gifts, partly to fix the lesson of the originals before he forgot it. The January 1889 paintings are the only ones to which Van Gogh signed his name (the 1888 paintings he left unsigned). The signature is on the jug — a small painted 'Vincent' worked into the glaze.
After the painting
Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. The Sunflowers were not among them. He died, by his own hand, in July 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, eighteen months after the second wave was painted. The paintings stayed in the family — with Theo, then with Theo's widow Johanna, who spent the last twenty years of her life building the market and the reputation of her late brother-in-law's work. Johanna sold individual Sunflowers paintings to public collections in London, Munich, Philadelphia, Tokyo, and Amsterdam in the 1900s and 1920s. The painting destroyed in the 1945 Allied bombing of Ashiya, Japan, is one of the seven.
Six remain. The August 1888 fourteen-stem in London, the August 1888 twelve-stem in Munich, the January 1889 twelve-stem in Philadelphia, the January 1889 fourteen-stem in Amsterdam, the early three-stem study in private hands, and the second early study with cut flowers on a table also in a private collection. Of the six survivors, the August 1888 paintings in London and Munich are the ones the world picks up as the canonical Sunflowers — the wall behind the flowers a hot, undifferentiated yellow, the petals shaped almost like flames, the painting all the way to the edges of the canvas.
Key takeaways
There are seven Van Gogh Sunflowers paintings, not one — five jug-bouquets and two studies of cut flowers on a turquoise table. Six survive.
They were painted in two bursts in Arles: four in August 1888 as a decoration scheme for the Yellow House, three more in January 1889 after Gauguin had left.
The Yellow House was Van Gogh's intended studio-community for painters of the north of Europe. The Sunflowers were the welcome decoration for Gauguin's bedroom.
Van Gogh used chrome yellow — a new nineteenth-century pigment available in three intensities. The yellows have oxidised toward brown over a hundred and thirty years; the paintings today are visibly duller than they were in 1888.
Van Gogh signed only the January 1889 paintings, with a small 'Vincent' worked into the glaze of the jug. The August 1888 paintings he left unsigned.
Browse Van Gogh and Post-Impressionist prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
New in the Journal: The Woman Who Made Van Gogh Famous
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