Sunflowers is a series of still life oil paintings that the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh painted. Among the Sunflowers paintings are three similar paintings with fifteen sunflowers in a vase, and two similar paintings with twelve sunflowers in a vase. Van Gogh painted the first Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, which is now in the Neue Pinakothek Museum in Munich, Germany, and the first Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, which is now in National Gallery, London, UK, in August 1888 when he was living in Arles southern France. The later similar paintings were painted in January the following year. The paintings are all painted on about 93 × 72 cm (37" × 28") canvases. An earlier series of four still life using sunflowers were painted in Paris in 1887.
Van Gogh began painting the works in late summer 1888 and continued into the following year. One went to decorate his friend Paul Gauguin's bedroom. The paintings show sunflowers in all stages of life, from fully in bloom to withering. The paintings were innovative for their use of the yellow spectrum, partly because of newly invented pigments made new colours possible. In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh wrote: the sunflower is mine in a way.
In March 1987, even those without interest in art were made aware of van Gogh's Sunflowers series when Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto paid the equivalent of $39,921,750 for Van Gogh's Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers at auction at Christie's London, at the time a record-setting amount for a van Gogh. Whether he bought the painting himself or on behalf of his company, the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Japan, the painting currently resides at Seiji Togo Yasuda Memorial Museum of Modern Art in Tokoyo. After the purchase a controversy arose whether this is a genuine van Gogh or an Emile Schuffenecker forgery.
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Reference
- Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov "The Ownership of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers," in Burlington Magazine, march 1998: listing eleven still lifes of sunflowers, four in Paris and seven in Arles.
