Sunflowers

Van Gogh painted this still life of sunflowers in Paris in 1887, a year before the more famous sunflower paintings he made in Arles. He was living with his brother Theo in Montmartre, studying the color theories of the Impressionists and experimenting with a palette that was brighter than anything he had used before. The painting shows four sunflowers in a simple vase, arranged against a pale blue background. Two of the flowers are in full bloom, their yellow petals radiating outward. The other two are past their peak, with the petals wilting and the seed heads darkening. The stems are long and green, crossing each other to create a loose, asymmetrical composition. The background is a flat, cool blue that pushes the warm yellows and greens forward. Van Gogh painted several versions of this composition in 1887. The Met's version is the largest and most finished. The paintings were experiments in complementary color: yellow against blue, orange against green. Van Gogh had read Charles Blanc's Grammar of the Arts of Design, which explained Eugene Chevreul's color theory, and he was testing the principles in paint. The contrast between the warm flowers and the cool background makes both colors appear more intense than they would in isolation. The Paris sunflowers are the direct predecessors of the Arles series. In August 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo that he was painting sunflowers again, this time for the bedroom of Paul Gauguin, who was coming to stay at the Yellow House. The Arles sunflowers are more famous: they are the ones that sold for $39.9 million in 1987 and appear on coffee mugs in every museum shop in the world. But the Paris paintings are where the subject began, and they have a freshness and directness that the later paintings sometimes lose. Oil on canvas, 43 by 61 centimeters. Van Gogh painted the flowers with thick, circular strokes, building the seed heads in dense ridges of brown and yellow. The petals are painted in single, confident strokes of pure chrome yellow, a pigment that was relatively new and that Van Gogh used more boldly than any painter before him. The blue background is painted in thin, even strokes, providing a flat field against which the flowers advance. The horizontal format and bright palette make this print work well in a kitchen, dining room, or any room with natural light. The yellows and blues pair with white walls, natural wood, and blue-and-white ceramics. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the brushwork room to read. The painting has a warm, optimistic quality that suits rooms where people eat or gather. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1922, purchased with the Rogers Fund. It was one of the first Van Gogh paintings to enter an American museum. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.