Unable to tackle portraits inside the Yellow House his studio was through the green door , he turned to still-lifes. Van Gogh liked to paint what he could see, so it is usually assumed that he placed his sunflowers in a pot in front of his easel. On a visit to Arles I bought a similar 19th-century rustic food pot in an antique shop and tried to place 15 sunflowers in it. The stems were much too thick and would not have fitted, but even squeezing in five and filling the pot with water would not have worked.
The pot was not steady enough—and the heavy flowers would have toppled over. But could I suggest that you focus on the blue line that separates the table and the background in the version with a yellow background. Unless it is pointed out, few viewers notice that the uneven and sketchy line has been painted just above the table and on the right side it is partly a double line. The table is also very slightly skewed, being higher to the left of the pot.
The separate blue line across the pot is patchy, with a series of fairly straight rather than curved marks. All this is deliberate, not the result of clumsy brushwork. He then relaxed by temporarily abandoning his studio for a shopping expedition in town. Both items may appear to be hanging behind his bed in the painting he made of his bedroom two months later. The other relatively unknown August still-life is Six Sunflowers.
Compared with Three Sunflowers , probably painted just the day before, the blooms here are presented more schematically, emphasising their spiky leafs and sepals. Six Sunflowers was the first Van Gogh to be bought by a Japanese collector. In it was acquired by Koyata Yamamoto, a wealthy cotton trader from Ashiya, near Osaka.
Yamamoto then hung the painting above his sofa, in a very ornate gilded frame. On 6 August , the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Ashiya was devastated in a separate American attack. More than 1, conventional bombs were dropped on Ashiya, with fires quickly spreading. Yamamoto escaped the bombing, living until A few years ago I made a discovery in an early Japanese publication.
Then goes on to say that he intends to decorate the whole studio with nothing but sunflowers. Though originally made for Gauguin, van Gogh later took the sunflower as his own personal artistic signature, telling his brother Theo in another letter in that "the sunflower is mine. Van Gogh never painted a single artwork entitled "Sunflowers.
A factor that distinguishes the artist's earlier Paris series is the fact that blossoms are laid casually on a surface in groups of two or four while in the Arles series, they are arranged in a vase in greater profusion. Vincent's contribution was a "Sunflowers" painting from his Paris series. In Arles, Vincent rented quarters in what he called the Yellow House , and furnished a room to accommodate Gauguin. He planned to decorate the room with sunflower paintings.
Later, the Yellow House would be the scene of Vincent's self-mutilation. In in Brussels, a Belgian painter bristled at having his paintings displayed in the same exhibition as "Sunflowers," saying Vincent was a charlatan.
Ahead of Gauguin's arrival, van Gogh decided he would decorate the Yellow House with paintings to please his guest. The first wave was of sunflowers. Though he battled with mental illness and self-doubt, the painter found joy in creating the Arles Sunflowers. In August of , he wrote to his beloved 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 what I'm at is the painting of some sunflowers.
In the same letter to Theo, Vincent wrote, "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 quickly.
Van Gogh finished four that month. Then in January of , he revisited the subject with three paintings known as The Repetitions , because they were copies of his third and fourth versions from his August series.
Between his initial version and their repetitions, by , there were seven Arles Sunflowers.
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