The Sunflowers 2

Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers

Arles, January 1889

Oil on canvas, 95 x 73 cm

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum

(Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

We’d ever painted Sunflowers paintings for clients from many cities of different countries.

Here below you can see some sample photos:

Van Gogh’s friend, Paul Gauguin was very well aware of what van Gogh was showing him: the only picture he managed to paint during his stay in the yellow house was Vincent Painting Sunflowers (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh).

He, too, identified his friend with the flower. For artist Van Gogh, The individual symbolism of the sunflowers was of secondary importance. Rather, they enabled van Gogh to display his working methods, how he approached his subjects, and what his particular concerns were in painting. 

The sunflowers he positioned in a vase early in the morning naturally called for urgency since they would wilt within hours. This provided van Gogh with the justification (as it were) for a devotion to speed which in fact he was only too glad to consider an end in itself. 

A painter unaccustomed to rapid work would never manage to seize the beauty that was wasting away minute by minute. It was the yellow of the sunflowers that was so magical, that color of the south to which van Gogh had already paid homage in painting his house yellow. Placed in front of a dark background, the color prompted associations of the typical contrast of the south, that contrast of blue and yellow which he had used in the painting of his house.