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"My dear Bernard...

The beautiful sun down here
in high summer,

it beats down on your head

and I have no doubt at all
that it drives you crazy.

Now, being that way already,
all I do is enjoy it.

I'm thinking of
decorating my studio

with half a dozen paintings
of sunflowers.

A decoration in which
harsh or broken yellows

will burst against
various blue backgrounds,

from the palest Veronese
to royal blue,

framed with thin wooden laths

and painted in orange lead.

Sorts of effects of
stained glass windows
of a Gothic church.

Ah, my dear pals,

we crazy ones,

let's enjoy with our eyes,
shall we?

Alas, nature gets paid in kind

and our bodies are despicable
and sometimes a heavy burden.

Oh, how I'd like to
spend these present days
in Pont-Aven...

But anyway,

I console myself
by reconsidering the sunflowers.

Ever yours, Vincent."

Every artist is known by one picture
that says it all,

it encapsulates
their artistic qualities.

I mean, we know that Rembrandt
is The Night Watch

and the Mona Lisa, OK,
that's Leonardo da Vinci.

In the case of van Gogh,
it's the sunflower.

It says really something
about his artistic qualities,

because he managed to do something
which was difficult to do.

It was something that,
by experimenting,

it became better.

It also says something
about his biography at the time,

somebody who
was really hoping for love,

gaiety, musicality in life,

something he didn't have at the time.

And we all know
what kind of tragedy
became part of his life,

but that's all included,
I tend to think.

People really love the sunflowers.

And they recognise
a human longing for happiness,

and all people have that.

It says it all...

That's why it is a masterpiece,
an iconic picture.

People love van Gogh
for two reasons.

The images are often fairly simple
when you first look at them,

but they have real depth to them.

And it's got a vibrant quality
and it's got marvellous colours.

But the other reason why van Gogh
is so popular

and why the public
is obsessed with him
is the story is his life,

which was absolutely extraordinary.

The way he began as an art dealer...
Tried various careers.

He went to Belgium,
to a coal mining area,

as a missionary,

and he failed at that.

He then decided to become an artist.

He mutilated his ear.

He ended up in an asylum
and he committed suicide.

It's an extraordinary story.

The exhibition is called
van Gogh and the Sunflowers,

here at the van Gogh Museum,

and it's focusing on the Sunflowers
in the collection of this museum.

There has been extensive research
into this masterpiece,

technical research,

and we want to share that
with the public,

the results of this technical study.

van Gogh painted in total
11 pictures of sunflowers...

..four of them
when he was living in Paris.

And these are still lifes
of sunflowers lying on a table.

And then the next year in Arles,
in Provence,

he paints
seven pictures of sunflowers.

One of them is lost, unfortunately,

and these are the famous pictures
of the large bunch of sunflowers
in a vase.

These paintings are now
all across the world,

in museums
and in private collections.

But each of them
has its own fascinating story.

He had been working
for five years as an artist,

and we have to remember
that he only worked as an artist
for ten years.

And when he painted,

he painted mainly in dark colours

and he was very much influenced
by the Barbizon school,

the French
realistic landscape painters,

peasant painters,
such as Jean-Francois Millet.

van Gogh had to make a decision
whether he would always
be painting peasants,

who wouldn't sell,

or think about
the near future, maybe,

and that's why
he decided to pick portraits
and flower still lifes,

who were the best subjects
if you wanted to make some money.

So, what you see
when he moves to Paris in 1886,

in the summer he really starts to
make at least roughly
40 flower still lifes.

Initially he did them, really,
as colour exercises.

You know,
he loved the different colours
of the flowers,

and he was getting interested
in how colours worked in paintings.

He met the Impressionists,

and that really made him
exuberant in his use of colours.

Settling in Montmartre,
as van Gogh did,

he would have been
in quite a traditional,

old-fashioned,
rural environment
on the doorstep of Paris, really,

and people were growing sunflowers
just for the sheer delight
in their colour

and their shape and so on.

But he would also have known
the kind of formal
flower painting tradition

that Manet
and that Jeannin and Quost

and others
of his contemporary generation
were producing.

And we find all sorts of
Language of Flowers allusions
in Fantin-Latour,

who's a sort of academic painter
of flowers,

contemporary with the Impressionists,

friendly with many of them,

just as Quost is on that borderline
between the academic, the symbolic,

the formal and the informal
Impressionist vision of nature.

He would also have heard about them,
I'm sure,

from his brother Theo,

who was buying pictures by Monet,
for example.

Monet was painting the sunflowers
that he grew at Vetheuil
in 1881 already,

Vetheuil being his own garden,
not far from the River Seine.

And the inspiration of the sunflower
is being taken up, then,

by the Impressionists, via Monet.

van Gogh's
hearing about Monet's pictures.

Monet's going to be doing
a number of further
sunflower pictures,

but at this point
we have the Vetheuil ones

that could have
come into his awareness.

The sunflowers belong to one genus

within, if you like,
the sunflower family.

And that genus
is called helianthus,

literally 'sun-flower'.

Helios, sun.

Anthus, flower.

There were no sunflowers in Europe
before 1492

and the discovery of the Americas.

Native Americans were using them
as a source of food,

essentially storing energy over the winter.

They were also using them
as dye plants.

They were being used medicinally,

but none of that
was transferred into Europe,

so the uses of the plant
were not transferred.

The genus arrived
in the early 16th century,

and at that period
they were primarily
seen as garden plants.

So, the fields of sunflowers
that we see today

would not be
the types of landscape
van Gogh would have encountered.

That thing that we think of
as a flower,

as a single flower,

in fact is not.

It is in fact
a collection of lots and lots...

Thousands of tiny little flowers.

And in fact, there are
two types of flowers there.

If you look very carefully,

you will see
the yellow petal-like structures.

They are one type of flower.

And then, if you go inside,

what you see are lots and lots of
tiny little flowers.

And they're the second type.

And it's only the ones in the centre
that produce seed.

The ones on the outside are sterile.

Surrounding this entire structure,

there are these leaf-like structures
which are called bracts.

And in fact,

that combination
of lots of small flowers,

surrounded by those bracts,

are the characteristic feature
of the whole family of plants

that the sunflowers belong to.

So, things like chrysanthemums,
daisies, thistles...

They're all in this family.

It's not a subtle plant.

It's capable of hanging on
in very rough conditions,

and suddenly it comes into Europe
and people start cossetting it.

They start looking after it.

They start putting it into
beautifully nurtured soil,

and then suddenly it goes mad...

With that potentially comes
all sorts of ideas of power,

and that,

if you think about
that nature is ordered
in the so-called scala naturae,

then you have
the big, dramatic plants
overlording the smaller plants.

And of course,

that's quite an interesting simile
for associating with humans

and human societies.

van Dyck's
Self-Portrait with a Sunflower
is really a very stunning sunflower.

He's looking towards it.

He's holding out his hand
and touching it with his finger

and he is also holding a chain,
a gold chain,

which we know was given to him
by Charles I.

So,
with the emblematic
use of sunflowers

as emblems of devotion, adoration...

And it can be interpreted
various ways.

You might see it as him alluding to
his own devotion to Charles I,

doing commissions for Charles I,

or you might see it as him,
in a slightly broader sense,

representing his profession,

that he responds to nature
as a visual artist,

portrays that.

Equally,
he turns the sunflower in this image
to signify his dedication to art.

The 17th century
is a really interesting period,

because the sunflower, obviously,
has come in the century before
from America

and has become part of the garden,

but it's still an exotic, really.

It's still something
people are fascinated by.

And we also have
other plants coming along,

like the chrysanthemum,

something that the Dutch
brought back through trade
in the late 17th century.

And so, painters of flowers
and of still life in Holland,

with their fascination
with the contemporary,

the here and now,

all that went with
the Dutch Republic

and the secularism
that that involved

were almost inevitably, I think,

going to turn to flowers
as things that were
new and interesting

and dynamic, almost.

You have to realise
that van Gogh in general
was mildly depressive.

So, he needed a more colourful,
a more bright,

a more hopeful kind of surroundings
for his own pictures

but also for himself,

simply to keep himself in balance.

It says something about the fact
that even in the Sunflowers,

where the wilting part
is so much part of that picture,

painting them in such a joyful way
really, really helped him

to...well, to get hope.

That's also what he says
about this particular motif,

that it would give him
hope for the future.

The first year,

he produced a lot of
flower still lifes

and he really hoped
that they would sell.

And we see not
the freshly cut flowers anymore,

but we see the ones that are dying,
fading away.

And he suddenly became interested
in something else.

We're still in Paris.

He made four magnificent
still lifes of sunflowers,

and you see dying sunflowers
that are after their bloom.

They're marvellous.

He loved those kinds of subjects.

Old, gloomy to a certain extent.

And now he'd found something
which is personal.

So,
he was now inventing a new subject,

you could say,

for the flowers.

That's an important moment,

because it's really different
from what you would do
for the market.

It's only later on
that artists became interested in
the picturesque kind of qualities

of dying flowers.

"I don't want to be
one of the melancholics

or those who become sour
and bitter and morbid.

To understand all is to forgive all,

and I believe
that if we knew everything
we'd arrive at a certain serenity.

If I didn't have Theo
it wouldn't be possible for me
to do justice to my work.

It's my plan to go to the south
for a while,

as soon as I can,

where there's even more colour
and even more sun."

When van Gogh went to Provence
in the South of France,

he went there
to look for brighter colours,

as he later writes in a letter.

He also
wanted to live in a warmer climate,

because the cold in Paris
was not good for him.

And he really felt, also,

that he needed to
go live in the countryside

and get away from the big city.

So, those were
a number of reasons for him
to leave Paris

and to move to more quiet,
more natural surroundings.

"I live in a little yellow house
with green door and shutters,

whitewashed inside.

On the white walls,
very brightly coloured
Japanese drawings.

Red tiles on the floor.

The house in the full sun
and a bright blue sky above it.

And the shadow
in the middle of the day
much shorter than at home."

"My dear Theo,

I'm writing to you in great haste,

to tell you that I've just received
a line from Gauguin,

who says that he hasn't written
because he was doing
a great deal of work,

but says he's still ready
to come to the south
as soon as chance permits.

I'm painting with the gusto
of a Marseillais,

eating bouillabaisse,

which won't surprise you
when it's a question of
painting large sunflowers.

I have three canvases on the go.

I'll probably not stop there.

In the hope of living
in a studio of our own with Gauguin,

I'd like to do a decoration
for the studio.

Nothing but large sunflowers."

The Yellow House
is where it all takes place,

where he paints his sunflowers

and where he puts his sunflowers
on the walls of Gauguin's bedroom.

It's the place
where he wants to create
his artists' colony,

with Gauguin as the first artist
who will join him there,

and where they will collaborate
and create a new art.

So, van Gogh has very high hopes
and ambitions in this period.

He's really looking forward
to Gauguin coming.

He is working all the time

to paint a lot of pictures
for his house.

And the first ones that he does
are the sunflowers.

We sort of think of the sunflowers
as a single painting sometimes,

but actually they were a series.

He did, actually,
four paintings in one week.

The first of the series
was three flowers
against a turquoise background.

And this painting was sold
soon after van Gogh's death,

and it's been owned
by a series of private collectors

who've kept it
very much to themselves.

In fact,
it was last exhibited back in 1948,

so it's never been seen
in public since.

And in 1996 it changed hands.

We don't know who the owner is,

so it's the great mystery
of the Sunflowers Series.

So, it's the only one
which is really likely
to come on the market.

And when it does
come back on the market,

it will fetch an enormous sum.

The second painting of the series
is of six flowers

against a rich
royal blue background,

and that's got
a particularly interesting story.

It was sold to a Japanese collector
in the early 1920s.

And in fact,
it was the first van Gogh painting
to go to Japan.

And it was owned by a collector
in the city of Ashiya.

Then, during the Second World War,

at the end of the war,
the Americans bombed Ashiya.

It was actually
on the day of the Hiroshima bomb,

although it was
a conventional bomb
that was dropped,

and there was a fire in the house.

The painting
was in a very heavy frame,

and it was burnt and destroyed.

Fortunately,
we have colour reproductions
of the painting

taken before the Second World War,

which is slightly unusual,

so we know what it looked like.

And one of
the interesting discoveries

was that the painting was originally
in a simple orange frame

which van Gogh had made.

He mentions this in passing
in his letters,

but it had not been appreciated
that this colour photograph

actually shows the frame
that van Gogh painted it in.

And it therefore shows the way
van Gogh wished it to be displayed.

The fourth of the series
that he did in Arles
and the yellow house

was sunflowers
against a yellow background.

And this painting
stayed with the van Gogh family,

with Jo Bonger,
who was Vincent's sister-in-law.

And she'd had the picture
in her room for her entire life,

and she said
she didn't want to sell it

when the National Gallery
wanted to buy it in the 1920s.

In 1923,

Samuel Courtauld,
the great fabric merchant
here in Britain,

decided to give a good deal of money
to the National Gallery

to buy modern pictures.

He also retained control
of what the modern pictures were

that the National Gallery bought.

They first went to Jo Bonger

and bought a
Portrait of the Postmaster Roulin,

a painting now in
the Museum of Modern Art
in New York.

After a few months of having it here
at the National Gallery,

Courtauld and his advisors
decided that,

already such was the fame
of the Sunflowers,

they returned the Postmaster Roulin

and replaced it
with the Sunflowers

that Jo Bonger had said
was the one that she wanted to keep
for the family.

And we said, rather arrogantly,
"But we're the National Gallery."

And, uh, she agreed.

And that's when, in '24,
this picture comes to us.

When van Gogh
was taken with an idea,

when he was taken with a motif

and he knew
where he wanted to go with it,

he tended to work
very, very quickly.

Having decided that sunflowers
would be what welcomed Gauguin
to Arles,

he painted four in rapid succession

and then chose two of them
to actually hang in the bedroom
that Gauguin would inhabit.

The London picture
is certainly one of those
that was there when Gauguin arrived.

The other one
is the picture now in Munich.

I think we've come now
to understand more fully

the relationship
between Gauguin and van Gogh

during these
two critical months in Arles,

and to realise the nature
of the aesthetic differences

that very quickly came to the fore.

van Gogh was committed to the motif.

That is, he was committed to
REALLY looking at somebody
or something when he painted.

Gauguin had moved on from that

to wanting to make
what he called 'abstractions'.

By abstractions,
we don't mean nonrepresentational,

but what he meant was something
where he had looked at the motif,

registered it

and then, as he actually painted it,

no longer had to look at the person,
at the object, himself.

And that allowed him to get closer
to what he called abstraction.

After two months,

I think that
the tensions between them...

And the tensions, really,
on an aesthetic level,

though we don't know
about the tensions
in the day-to-day living

in the yellow house...

The tensions on an aesthetic level
had reached such a point

that almost at Christmas
they had a huge fight,

a huge falling out.

Later, Gauguin would claim
that van Gogh struck him,

but there was a break
right before Christmas.

And it's at that moment,

as Gauguin leaves
to go back to Paris,

that van Gogh
has a mental breakdown of some kind,

cuts off his ear...

And really, after that,
has to be committed to an asylum.

"My dear Theo...

Physically, I'm well.

The wound is closing very well,

and the great loss of blood
is balancing out,

since I'm eating and digesting well.

The most fearsome thing
is the insomnia,

and the doctor
didn't talk to me about it,

nor have I spoken to him
about it yet.

But I'm fighting it myself.

Now, if I recover,

I must start again,

and I can't again
attain those peaks

to which sickness
imperfectly led me."

Our museum is associated with
the insurance company.

The insurance company
was named Yasuda,

and the Yasuda
was established in 1888.

This is a very significant year,

because Vincent painted
the Sunflower Series in 1888.

So, Yasuda bought this painting
in the auction of Christie's.

I think he tried something to study

and for developing his technique
or theory of colour.

Simple compositions, also.

Our Sunflowers
was painted at the end of November

to the beginning of December,

just before Paul Gauguin
and van Gogh struggled,

as in the famous accident
when he cut the ear.

Just after Paul Gauguin
arrived in Arles

he bought 20-metre jute,

very rough canvas,

and they separate
ten metre, ten metre...

And they shared this jute,

and our Sunflowers
is painted on this jute.

It was not the season
for sunflowers.

He needed something in front of him,

so he copied his own painting.

In his letter,

he said he wanted to paint
a very big decoration
for a small room,

like Japanese.

Our Sunflowers
is showing 15 sunflowers,

but Vincent, in a letter,
he said 14 sunflowers.

Well, it's a kind of mystery.

Someone said he painted 14

and after that
he painted one more flower.

We don't have an answer yet...

I think we have to understand
that the pictures are a construct.

We don't know how many flowers
were in any vase at any given time.

He may have added them,
taken them away,

ensured balance as he painted.

But they are a construct
that leads to
a very convincing image.

This is not unknown to artists.

The Tokyo painting,
it was sold in 1987,

when it fetched a record price
of £25 million,

which was absolutely enormous
at that time.

Of course, prices have risen since.

And when it was sold,

the fact that it wasn't signed

led to some questions
about whether it was
authentic or not.

It were thoroughly studied
by the van Gogh Museum,

and they proved that it is indeed
a copy made by van Gogh.

There were no flowers blooming
when he did the copies,

so he was essentially
making his versions,

painting other versions
from his original paintings.

Two with a yellow background,
one with a turquoise background.

They're very similar
to the originals

that he did in August
with the fresh flowers,

but there are
some minor differences

and differences in colour...

Very minor differences.

So, he was making what were
loosely described as copies,

but they're quite legitimate
works of art.

The research on the painting
actually started in the late 1990s,

to look at the relationship
between the first version,

which is now in London,

and ours,
which is a copy after that painting.

Over the years
we did detailed studies,

technical studies of the paintings,

to examine the way
that van Gogh worked.

So, if you like,
to give a sort of...

Like, a picture of looking over
his shoulder while at work.

To look at
the different stages of painting.

Which materials did he choose?

Which did he purchase?
Why did he purchase?

How did he apply them?

Which colours did he use?
How did he mix them?

How did he set the design
of his paintings onto the canvas?

So, one of the big questions,

actually one of the main reasons
to do this research,

was to have an up-to-date assessment
of the condition of the painting,

which is 130 years old,

in order to know how to present it,

what kind of lighting conditions,
how to conserve...

What should we be doing
with the painting

to make sure that it lasts
for the next generations?

Some of the colours that he used,

which were new tube colours
in the late 19th century,

they were sensitive to light.

So, on the one hand,

you have red lake colours
that have faded,

and on the other hand,

you have
a particular type of yellow,

a chrome yellow pigment
that turns darker
under influence of light.

So, we knew
from examining the painting

which areas had been affected.

And we had,
from tiny microscopic samples,

we had some idea
of the pigment mixtures
that had been used.

It's very hard to imagine
what the picture
could have actually looked like.

So, we considered
making a digital reconstruction

that would
approximate the colours
as they could have been originally,

but what we decided to do
was to actually have
a physical reconstruction

made of the painting,

trying to understand
the original build-up of a painting
by van Gogh

and what he was trying to achieve
at the different stages of painting.

In case of the Sunflowers,

we know that it's different
in how you experience it nowadays

than it was in the 19th century.

And the museum asked me
to paint two reconstructions.

In one reconstruction,

we wanted to show
the impact of varnish
on a painting,

because van Gogh
did not varnish his paintings

because the impact is quite strong.

In the other reconstruction,

we wanted to go back
and find the original colour scheme

that van Gogh used in his painting.

And for that,

it was important
that we used the same pigments,

so similar pigments.

Quite a lot of them
were made in a research project
that ended in 2016,

a research project in which
the van Gogh Museum participated.

And I could use those paints.

But I had not used
these chrome yellows

and these geranium lakes before.

Normally,
I do more medieval reconstructions,

so for me it was really exciting
to start painting with these paints.

And they were much brighter
than I expected.

I knew there would be
yellow paint and orange paint,

that they would be that bright...

But at the same moment,

well, you can assume
that these pigments don't lie.

Yeah,
it was quite surprising for me,

but also hard,

because the original,
it has brown sunflowers in it.

And especially when you reconstruct
or copy a painting,

you want to look at the original.

But it's really hard
when you have something
really bright on your easel,

it's almost giving light...

Light is coming out,

and it's hard,
since the original
is not that bright.

We managed to get
a much broader understanding

of the whole biography
of the object,

not just how and with what
Vincent created
this particular painting,

but what has happened since.

During the painting process,

at some point Vincent
must have realised
that he didn't have enough height

to create the composition.

This top flower, for example,

got too near
to the edge of the canvas.

The canvas he painted on stops here.

So, in order to give it more air,

to give it more room,

he decided to
make a little piece of wood

and attach it
on top of the stretched canvas

and then paint over it.

So, what you see over here
are his brushstrokes.

However,
when the painting was relined
in 1927,

the canvas
had to be taken off the stretcher.

And in order to be able to do that,

the conservator
had to take off the wooden strip.

And that caused a big crack
in Vincent van Gogh's brushstrokes.

He then
applied the piece of wood again

and filled the crack
that had occurred
because of his intervention.

We have to respect that.

We cannot remove those retouchings.

We may not be very happy
with the way they look,

but we've decided to try to make
those retouchings less obvious,

less visible
from a normal viewing distance.

The painting has been subjected
to heat, solvents and so on.

It's not something that we do now.

And as a result of the combination
of the original painting materials
used by van Gogh,

and the treatments
that it's had in later years,

this has effectively led to
these little losses of paint,

tiny, microscopic losses,

although this is stable.

But to avoid any risk
of possible vibration
that could occur during transport,

it was decided
not to have it travel at all.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art
is an encyclopaedic museum.

It's one of the largest of its kind
in the United States.

Our Sunflowers painting
joined the collection in 1963.

It was the gift of Carroll Tyson,

who was a Philadelphian
who was an artist

who actually travelled to Paris
in the 1890s.

But along the way,
he also became a great collector,

buying both the van Gogh Sunflowers,
great works by Manet,

by Monet, Renoir and others.

van Gogh's Sunflowers
have an extraordinary appeal.

At just one level,

they are a very simple,
very spare painting

of a group of flowers
arranged in a pot,

but they continue to enthral.

The Philadelphia Sunflowers
is the only version of Sunflowers
in the United States.

So, when visitors
come upon it in the galleries,

they're surprised.

I get asked quite often,
"Is it real?

Is this the real Sunflowers?"

And I say, "Yes, it's one of
a number that he painted."

It's quite striking in Philadelphia

that he's taken these 14 blooms,
14 flower heads,

kept them
in a fairly similar arrangement
that he'd worked out earlier,

but he's given each one
a very strong personality.

He's included the flower
with the bent stem on the right.

He has also added elements,

such as the bright-red eye
of one of the flowers.

So, he is making a number of changes
as he goes along

to this composition of the flowers.

It's a simple subject.

It's one that he loved,
a humble subject.

Perhaps he liked to think of himself
as a humble individual.

And so, I think it's works
that we can appreciate

without feeling a sense of
that kind of anguish

or some of the anxiety
or some of the mental health issues
that he had as well.

Throughout his career, van Gogh
was very taken with Japanese art.

And I think it's perhaps no accident
that in the Sunflowers

you get such a sense of
the decorative.

They're very flattened
picture planes.

There's no shadow.

Nice sense of contour,
very bold colour.

These are all elements
that he would have seen
in Japanese woodblock prints.

There's such an exuberance to paint
and to colour in these works.

van Gogh once said,

"I'd like to paint in such a way
that anyone who has eyes
could see or to understand."

And I think that comes across
in this work.

It has tremendous appeal,

in the sense that
we can see how he's applied paint

and the delight he's taken
in this sense of colour.

This sense of experimentation,
actually,

was one of the things
that came out of
this Sunflower research, too,

because there you have
a series of what looks like
the same motif.

And you think, "They look
very similar to each other."

But having been able to compare
in great detail
these different versions,

in particular
the three yellow-on-yellow versions,

so the yellow bouquet
against the yellow background,

you can really appreciate
that there's a sort of logic

in the subtle differences
between them.

There was really
a development between...

They're not exact replicas
of each other.

Uh, each one is different.

We don't really know why the public
tends to prefer
one painting to another

or why particular works
become iconic above other ones,

but it's not just a personal thing,

because it's a very broad thing,
a phenomenon.

These light yellows,
it's a very optimistic painting.

The way it's painted,

with these
very swirling brushstrokes,

sometimes really rapidly
in the background,

it's a very invigorating painting.

Lots of positive energy.

The Sunflowers
is the rock star painting
in our collection,

where merely being in the presence
constitutes some kind of validation.

"I was there!"

And for many people,
I think that's very important.

All you need to do is to show
a little bit of the sunflower

and you know
who you're talking about.

And you don't often find that
with many artists.

You don't often find that, in fact,
with van Gogh's other work.

That set of material is the thing
that coalesced around our image

and our view of
A, what a sunflower is

and B,
what van Gogh was all about.

People are fascinated by van Gogh.

They're almost
obsessed with the story
of his extraordinary life.

And if you stand in front of
the Sunflowers,

you have a feeling
of the man behind the painting.

It really has become the world's
most instantly recognisable
work of art.

"My dear Theo...

Gauguin was telling me the other day
that he'd seen a painting
by Claude Monet

of sunflowers
in a large Japanese vase.

Very fine...

But he likes mine better.

I'm not of that opinion,

only don't think I'm weakening.

I regret as always, as you know,

the scarcity of models,

the thousand obstacles
to overcome their difficulty.

If I were a completely different man
and if I were wealthier,

I could force it...

But at present, I'm not giving up.

And I am plodding on...quietly."

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