HISTORY OF ART: Vincent Van Gogh. Sunflowers.

HISTORY OF ART: Vincent Van Gogh.  Sunflowers.

Interest in Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' was whipped up when in 1987 the Japanese fire-insurance company Yasuda paid $39.9 million for the painting below.

Those curious as to what was remarkable about the painting that fetched such a hefty price found out that it was one of a series of sunflower paintings done by the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh in the period from August to September 1888.  

Van Gogh painted the Sunflowers series in a mood of sunny optimism when he was waiting for the arrival of the avant-garde painter, Paul Gaugin. They had rented a studio in Arles, in southern France and were planning to work together. The sunflowers were meant to be a sign of friendship and welcome. Van Gogh hoped that Gaugin would lead a community of artists that would be established in Arles - The Studio of the South. Van Gogh was contemptuous of the art trade and thought that artists could best fulfil their potential if they didn't care whether their works were sold or not but worked together toward a common goal in a peaceful place like Arles.

Vincent Van Gogh      The Harvest     Arles    June 1888    

In a letter to his brother Theo Van Gogh wrote: "I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when you know that what I'm at is the painting of some big sunflowers. I have three canvases going – 1st, three huge flowers in a green vase, with a light background, 2nd, three flowers, one gone to seed, having lost its petals, and one a bud against a royal-blue background, 3rd , twelve flowers and buds in a yellow vase. The last one is therefore light on light, and I hope it will be the best. Probably I shall not stop at that. Now that I hope to live with Gauguin in a studio of our own, I want to make decorations for the studio. Nothing but big flowers. Next door to your shop, in the restaurant, you know there is a lovely decoration of flowers; I always remember the big sunflowers in the window there. If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.”

Van Gogh arrived in Arles on October 23rd but unfortunately the alliance of the two painters was not to endure. They worked together throughout the autumn of 1888, but it was becoming more and more apparent that they had different views on art and were temperamentally incompatible. Gauguin wrote about Van Gogh's work: 'With all these yellows on violets, all this work in complementary colours - disordered work on his part - he only arrived at subdued, incomplete and monotonus harmonies; the sound of the clarion was missing.' Thus the feelings of love and hope that Van Gogh had been brimming with anticipating his cooperation with Gaugin were frustrated. At the end of the year he had a nervous breakdown and cut off part of his ear, which was the beginning of the serious mental health problems that would plague the painter for many years to come. 

Never before had Van Gogh worked more productively than in those months of waiting in Arles and the sunflowers paintings he created have a unique place in the history of art.  Godfrey Braker, an art historian wrote: "For many people these pictures start the modern movement in art. They're brilliant in colour. They're like no flower paintings anyone had ever seen before. They're excited. They're animated. The flowers are fighting each other, talking to each other.'