Original subtitles

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

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

I'm thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of

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 -au -Vert.

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, okay,

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

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

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 recognize our 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

quality, and it's got marvelous colors.

But the other reason why Van Gogh is so popular and why the public is obsessed

with him is the story of 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

There's been extensive research into this masterpiece, technical research,

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 lives 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 colors, and he was very much

influenced by the Barbizon school, the French realistic landscape painters,

peasant painters such as Jean -François Millet.

Verhoog 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

pick portraits and flower still lifes, who were the best subject 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 colour.

In Paris, he would have used a variety of flowers and some of his friends would

bring him flowers, a wide variety, depending on the seasons.

Van Gogh loved sort of basic nature, and I think that's one of the reasons why

these flowers appeal to him so much.

In Antwerp, I did not even know what the Impressionists were.

Now I've seen them, and though not being one of the club, yet, I have much

admired certain Impressionist pictures.

Degas, nude figure.

Claude Monet, landscape.

And now for what regards what I myself have been doing.

I have lacked money for paying models, else I would have entirely given myself

to figure painting.

But I have made a series of color studies in painting simply flowers, red

poppies, blue cornflowers and meosotis, white and rose roses,

yellow chrysanthemums, seeking oppositions of blue with orange,

red and green.

yellow and violet, seeking the broken and neutral tones to harmonize brutal

extremes.

And so I'm struggling for life and progress in art.

Settling in Montmartre, as Van Gogh did, he would have been in quite a

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

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 Couste and others of his contemporary generation

producing.

We know he admired Coast's work, well, Coast chose hollyhocks in his own

garden, and those could have been read symbolically as emblems of fecundity,

that was the meaning given to them at that point, or they could have been read

as an exercise in colour, and the market would have consisted of people who

wanted something decorative for their apartment, but equally people who were,

it were, looking to painting for an insight into an idea.

And we find all sorts of language of flowers, allusions in Fontaine Latour,

who's a sort of academic painter of flowers, contemporary with the

Impressionists, friendly with many of them, just as Coast is on that

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 Tzio, who was

buying pictures by Monet, for example. Monet was painting the sunflowers that

grew at Vétheuil in 1881 already, Vétheuil being his own.

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 Vétheuil ones that could have come into his awareness.

There's a sort of turning point going on in Paris where those two traditions of

Impressionism and Realism are beginning to meet each other in Van Gogh's

thinking.

with the number of false teeth, etc.

But why does that matter?

I have a dirty and difficult occupation.

Painting. And if I weren't as I am, I wouldn't paint.

But being as I am, I often work with pleasure.

And I see the possibility, glimmering through, of making paintings in which

there's some youth and freshness.

Although my own youth is one of those things I've lost.

Last year, I painted almost nothing but flowers to accustom myself to a color

other than gray.

That's to say, pink.

Soft or bright green.

Light blue.

Violet. Yellow.

Orange. Fine red.

And when I painted landscape in Ancière this summer, I saw more color in it than

before.

One of the things that was driving lots of things from this period was this idea

of competitive gardening and the great and the good wanting to make sure that

they had something that they can outdo their friends with.

The sunflowers belong to one genus within, if you like, the sunflower

and that genus is called Helianthus, literally sunflower, 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

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

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 that Van Gogh would have encountered.

They were these fantastically unusual plants. There's nothing like it in

Huge flower head, long stalk.

They also have a range of different colours associated with them. So we

sunflowers as primarily as being yellow.

But, of course, they do show a range. You go from very pale colours all the

through to colours that are getting into the red spectrum, dark orange.

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 petalite 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

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

daisies, thistles, they're all in this family.

Over time, it was discovered that, in fact, the seeds were a good source of

and were potentially a good food material. They were not toxic. They

lot of high -quality oil. But it took a long time for people to actually

discover those culinary values of sunflowers itself.

And, of course, the other thing that we find about sunflowers is this idea that

they track...

the sun that that flower head actually follows the sun on its daily arc that's

myth it doesn't do that at all when they're very young what you find is that

sunflowers will as in fact all seedlings they move and that they move during the

day and this is a process called circumnutation but it's not associated

movement of the sun it's actually associated with gravity it's not a

plant it's capable of hanging on in very rough conditions

And suddenly it comes into Europe and people start costing 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 natura, then you have the

big, dramatic plants overloading the smaller plants. And, of course, that's

quite an interesting simile for associating with humans and human

Van Dyck's self -portrait with the 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

him alluding to his own devotion to Charles I, doing commissions for Charles

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

but it's still an exotic really. It's still something people are fascinated

And we also have other plants coming along like chrysanthemum, something that

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

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.

There will be always that symbolism underpinning the depiction of the

such,

at their prime for a short time only, they're cut, the petals will fall off,

they won't be there anymore, they encapsulate that moment, that specific

-ness and now -ness, as it were.

There is a really interesting example of this in the hands of Maria van

Oosterwijk, who was a Dutch artist, a very interesting individual.

deeply religious so she probably looked at the sunflower through the eyes of

contemporary religious symbolism as the flower that turned to the sun therefore

was an emblem of the soul turning to god but what she does in her still life of

a sunflower and various other flowers is is really subtle and intriguing.

She includes the sunflower at the apex of the composition, wonderful yellow

petals crowning it, as it were, looking over the whole scene. And then she edges

up to it a little chrysanthemum.

Actually, not a very little one, a reasonable size chrysanthemum.

And this flower must have been absolutely new.

It was only published in 1689.

This painting's 1675 at the latest.

It must have been growing as a new thing, just brought through to Holland

traders who'd been over to China or possibly Japan, and therefore it's

rival, it's a challenge to the sunflower.

The sunflower's maybe going to be dethroned by this flower that Maria van

Oosterwijk then just puts in juxtaposition with it. And then at the

the composition, in the little motif of the lid from the pot, it's a kind of

ceramic that's been sculpted to make a little finial. and that finial is the

statuette of Venus.

So we have Venus herself dethroned, not just by the sunflower, but also by the

chrysanthemum. And then we have a butterfly just at the very far left,

the soul, emblem of transience, but also of spirituality, and in a sense, the

emblem of Christ it sometimes is. So it's almost as though there's a dialogue

going on between the real material world and that spiritual world that Maria was

so much involved in as a deeply religious individual.

Equally Van Gogh would have been very familiar with those colour combinations

from his knowledge of Vermeer for example in Dutch 17th century art where

already get explorations of juxtaposed and different contrasts of colour.

And it's almost as though he sees the flowers as an opportunity in still life

painting to explore what he can do with colour.

So I think the sunflowers would have been those notes of yellow.

It's rather interesting that when he gets to do his full.

Sunflower series, as he later calls them, a symphony in blue and yellow,

thinking of harmony and contrast.

Then we have this yellow still life from the Paris period in the exhibition.

It's quite an interesting still life. And so it's a still life of fruit.

quinces and lemons and pears. And it is very interesting in this context because

it's a painting of yellow on yellow.

completely yellow painting or nearly only yellow painting for the very first

time. And he's experimenting with how to achieve a very strong color effect with

only gradations of yellow. And that's something that he will take a step

with the sunflowers.

You have to realize that Van Gogh in general was mightily 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 the sunflowers, where the wilting

part is so much part of that picture, painting them in such a joyful way

really helped him to, well, to get hope.

That's also what he says about this particular motif, that it would give

well, hope for the future.

My dear little sister, you see for yourself in nature that many a flower is

trampled, freezes, or is parched.

Further, that not every grain of wheat, once it has ripened, ends up in the

earth again to germinate there and become a stalk.

But far and away the most grains do not develop, but go to the mill, don't they?

Now. Comparing people with grains of wheat, and every person who's healthy

natural, there's the power to germinate as in a grain of wheat.

And so, natural life is germinating.

What the power to germinate is in wheat, so love is in us.

I do think that the very idea of the human being as an extension of a plant

-ordered universe was really fundamental in the 19th century.

We have the advent of plate glass. We have the opportunity to cultivate exotic

flowers at home in greenhouses that are built with glass and iron construction

from the mid -19th century.

And equally, there's the development of hybridisation that gradually gathers

momentum through the 19th century, creation of all sorts of new species.

So painters begin to respond to the flower as something that offers

opportunities for analysis of form, study of colour.

a sense of design, of pattern.

And we have Renoir, for example, saying that he likes painting flowers because

he doesn't have to worry about getting the likeness of a sitter. He can instead

concentrate on that play of colour and form.

The first year he produced a lot of flower still lifes and he really hoped

they would sell and we see not the freshly cut flowers anymore, but we see

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

there after they bloom.

They're marvellous.

He loved those kind of subjects, alts.

gloomy to a certain extent, and now he's 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 pittoresque kind of

qualities of dying flowers.

He was clearly fascinated by these high plants. He depicted them on several

occasions in drawings, in paintings too, where he is highlighting

the length or the height of these flowers by putting little figures in the

picture with them.

These are views of Montmartre. On the hill you had this beautiful view of the

city, so you see the city in the background, but it's a very rural area.

There's an interesting painting in the exhibition which we don't often show.

It's actually a double -sided painting.

So on the other side we have a portrait of a woman from Nuenen in Brabant.

And he paints this landscape scene with a larger -than -life sunflower in a

garden in Montmartre. And in the background he puts a little figure of a

looking at the view above the houses. So he's contrasting this very large...

sunflowers with the little figure and it's interesting because it's almost

a human figure, this sunflower.

My dear little sister, 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

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

It's my plan to go to the South for a while, as soon as I can, where there's

even more color and even more sun.

When Van Gogh went to Provence in the south of France, he went there to look

brighter colors, 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

city. So those were a number of reasons for him to leave Paris and to move to a

more quiet, more natural surroundings.

My dear sister, the color here is actually very fine.

When the vegetation is fresh, it's a rich green, the like of which we seldom

in the north.

Calm.

When it gets scorched and dusty, it doesn't become ugly.

But then a landscape takes on tones of gold of every shade.

Green gold, yellow gold, red gold, ditto bronze, copper.

In short, from lemon yellow to the dull yellow color of, say, a pile of fresh

grain, that with the blue.

From the deepest royal blue in the water to that of, forget -me -nots, cobalt

above all, bright clear blue, green blue and violet blue.

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

inside, on the white walls, very brightly colored Japanese drawings.

Red tiles on the floor, the house in the full sun, and a bright blue sky

above it.

The shadow in the middle of the day, much shorter than at home.

At the time, there were no fields of sunflowers. There were gardens with

sunflowers, amongst a lot of other flowers. And we have this very beautiful

drawing in the collection, a large drawing in pen and ink, which shows

that type of garden. So we know from his letters that this is the garden of a

bathhouse, a public bathhouse.

It's lovely how he's drawn all the different flowers. And the sunflowers,

can recognize them immediately. They're very distinctive, how he's drawn them.

And they're also, they're very high, just like the sunflowers that he painted

Paris and drawn in Paris. You see the sunflowers again in Arles.

This is where he found them, and there's this beautiful little sketch that he

does in the letter to Theo of a painting that he's just done in a...

a farmhouse, garden, again, many, many different kinds of flowers, but also

sunflowers, and he indicates that near the sketch he says that there are

sunflowers too.

My dear Theo, I'm writing to you in great hate 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 at 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 Marseillaise eating bouillabaisse, which

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 her 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

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

It's the place where he wants to create his artist 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.

It's interesting how he actually started painting them. Originally, he didn't

have this idea.

Originally, he was going to paint a landscape painting in Arles, which is

wonderful on the outskirts, the farming areas.

But then there was a very strong mistral storm and wind, which made it very

difficult to paint.

So he decided to paint a portrait. But then he arranged, or tried to arrange,

for someone to come to sit for the portrait, and they didn't show up.

So he couldn't do a portrait.

So he was left with doing a still life, which didn't depend on the weather or

people. And because sunflowers were at their best, he then decided to paint

sunflowers. And he got a large bunch of sunflowers, and he got a pot, and he

started painting them.

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 the Turquoise

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 Sunflower

series.

So it's the only one which is very likely to come on the market, and when

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.

And 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

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

simple orange frame which Van Gogh had made.

He mentions this in passing in his letters, but it has not been appreciated

this colour photograph actually shows the frame that Van Gogh painted it in,

it therefore shows the way that Van Gogh wished it to be displayed.

My dear sister, at the moment I'm working on a bouquet of twelve

yellow earthenware pot, and have a plan to decorate the whole studio with

nothing but sunflowers.

You'll certainly notice that in the summer in Paris the sun shines much more

strongly than at home.

There's a similar difference again between Paris and here.

I wouldn't mind going a bit further, though, where the land isn't as flat as

I've actually never seen a mountain in my life.

I will do that sometime when Gauguin's here.

But I'll stay here in Arles until then. And, as soon as he comes, we'll like to

go on a walking tour together all over Provence.

I'm busy with my sunflowers, and in fact...

can think of nothing to say.

So I'll just end, wishing Theo and you really good days and fine weather.

The Münchner painting was created in August 1888.

He painted in this time frame within a few days, I think it's only six days, he

painted four different versions.

These are the first elaborate attempts with which he also deals with the color

yellow,

with which he deals with color contrasts, how they affect each other.

When you look at the composition, you notice that the painting does not rely

three -dimensionality.

It is not an illusionary painting space, but Van Gogh really reduces the

painting to the flatness of the canvas, an idea that he certainly won through

the study of Japanese art.

This is certainly a very special quality that allows, on the one hand, to

concentrate on the composition, but on the other hand also on the painter's

expression, on the artist's style.

Because he really applies the color in coarse brushstrokes, very passively on

the canvas.

The picture not only appears, it becomes an object itself.

The sunflower is the flower of light. It is yellow, it is friendly, and in this

sense it is of course appreciated by many people as the symbol of the sun.

It is also a symbol of friendship, of affection, and in this sense Frank

certainly also painted.

The special features of this painting are of course the color contrast.

It is this blue -green background that, in its own way, connects itself to a

very peculiar composition with the yellow floor, with the yellowed vase,

but above all with the sunflower itself. It is a bit unusual.

It is not a complementary contrast as one would expect.

but it is the complementary color, the mixture of yellow and blue.

And with that, of course, he moves in a very small, very small spectrum of

color. But the more exciting, the more attractive the contrast is, of course.

And I think that's what this painting is about.

Painting, as it is, now promises to become more subtle, more music and less

sculpture. In fact, it promises color, as long as it keeps this promise.

The sunflowers are progressing.

There's a new bouquet of 14 flowers on a green -yellow background, so it's

exactly the same effect, but in larger format, a number 30 canvas, as the still

life of quinces and lemons.

that you already have but in the sunflowers the painting is much simpler

ever yours vincent

The fourth of the series that he did in Arles and the Yellow House was

Sunflowers Against the 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 the National

bought. They first went to Joe Banger 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, Kurthold 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 Joe

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 she agreed, and that's where in 24 this picture

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

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

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

and Van Gogh during these two critical months in Arles and to realize the

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

By abstractions, we don't mean non -representational, 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

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

My dear old Bernard, Gauguin interests me greatly as a man.

Greatly.

For a long time it has seemed to me that in our filthy job as painters we have

the greatest need of people with the hands and stomach of a labourer.

More natural tastes, more amorous and benevolent temperaments than the

and exhausted Parisian men about town. Now here!

Without a slight doubt, we're in the presence of an unspoiled creature with

instincts of a wild beast.

With Gauguin, blood and sex have the edge over ambition.

But enough of that.

You've seen him close at hand longer than I have.

Just wanted to tell you first impressions in a few words.

In this relationship, one of the most interesting examples of the distance

between these two artists involved the paintings of Madame Ginoux, the woman

ran the famous night café.

As they sat together, side by side, painting Madame Ginoux, Van Gogh

dashed off a portrait in an hour.

Gauguin made a very careful drawing.

of madame she knew very carefully shaded big simple forms to get her basic shape

and then he went away and painted the actual painting of madame she knew

entirely in her absence only using the drawing and that i think

suggests the distance in approach that had crept in between them

My dear Theo, Gauguin, in spite of himself and in spite of me,

has proved to me a little that it was time for me to vary things a bit.

I'm beginning to compose from memory, and all my studies will still be useful

me for that work, as they remind me of former things I've seen.

In the meantime, I can tell you anyway that the last two studies are...

Rather funny.

A wooden and straw chair, all yellow on red tiles against a wall.

Daytime. Then Gauguin's armchair, red and green, night effect.

On the seat, two novels and a candle.

On sailcloth, in a thick impasto.

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

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.

I can't again attain those peaks to which sickness imperfectly led me.

After he painted the sunflowers, Van Gogh had an interesting idea how they

be displayed.

He'd painted a portrait of one of his friends, a woman who'd just given birth,

and he painted her singing a lullaby to the little infant.

And Van Gogh's idea was that this portrait should be the centre of a

and on either side there would be two sunflower paintings, one on a yellow

background and one on a blue background.

And Van Gogh felt that the sunflower paintings on either side would somehow

illuminate the portrait.

And it also has resonances with religious triptychs, where you might

picture of Christ in the middle with two other scenes on the side.

Every time I go to the National Gallery, I go and look at the sunflowers, and I

go quite often.

It was the painting which Van Gogh was most pleased with. It was the last of

series that he did with the sunflowers in front of him in the Yellow House.

One of the things that really makes the sunflower paintings is the way that the

flowers are at different stages of their life.

There's one that's got a bud that's just going to come into life.

Half of the sunflowers are out at full bloom, looking like sunflowers that we

would buy in the shops at their best. And then the other half of the

are turning to seed, which is what sunflowers do.

And I think for Van Gogh there was a symbolism.

in this it was the cycle of life if you like and the painting in a way is almost

like a family different generations at different stages so that adds an

interesting layer to the pictures and they're not just pretty flowers

We talked about the flowers all the time, but we forget to say something

the jar, what it is. And it's, of course, the kind of thing that they use

over in the South. It's a simple jar for olives or things like that.

It's not a vase, it's a jar, and there was something in it. Are they big enough

to keep those sunflowers in it? Probably not.

Probably it would have fallen over.

What you see in that particular picture is that he's really experimenting with

impasto versus flatter kind of areas with solid blocks of color.

And he was a master in that because it's very difficult to combine that in a way

that's convincing.

And it's on jute because that's the kind of canvas that they used at the time.

In principle, Gauguin was very much...

an artist who could play with different tints of one color.

So he probably suggested something to Van Gogh to improve upon that, and we

that they worked together on Stay Lives during their stay, and we know that Van

Gogh made another copy of the work, which is in the National Gallery, and

a picture which is nowadays in Japan.

My dear friend Gauguin, thanks for your letter.

left behind alone on board my little yellow house, as it was perhaps my duty

be the last to remain here anyway.

You talked to me in your letter about a canvas of mine, the sunflowers with a

yellow background, to say that it would give you some pleasure to receive it.

I don't think you've made a bad choice if Janine has the peony, Coast the

hollyhock, I, indeed, before others, have taken the sunflower.

I think that I'll begin by returning what belongs to you, making it plain

it's my intention, after what has happened, to contest categorically your

to the canvas in question.

But, as I commend your intelligence in the choice of that canvas, I'll make an

effort to paint two of them exactly the same, in which case it might be done

once and for all, and thus settled.

amicably.

Our museum is associated with the insurance company.

The insurance company was named Yasuda.

And Yasuda was established 1888. This is a very significant year because

Vincent painted Sanford of Ceres 1888.

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

I think he tried something to study and developing his technique or...

theory of color, simple compositions also.

Our sunflower 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, he cut the ears.

Just after Paul Gauguin arrived, he bought 20 meter jute.

very rough canvas and they separate to meter to meter and they hear this jute

and our sunflower is painting on this jute it was not the

season of sunflowers he needed something in front of him so he copied his

own painting in his letter he said he wanted to

paint very big a decoration for small room like Japanese.

Our sunflowers showing 15 sunflowers but Vincent in letter he said 14

sunflowers.

Well, it's a kind of mystery.

Someone says 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.

When it was sold, the fact that it wasn't signed led to some questions

whether it was authentic or not.

Nobody raised any questions or issues about it when it hung side by side

with our picture. People accepted it as two variations on Vincent's great theme.

It's only when it's been at this great remove in Tokyo the questions of its

authenticity have arisen.

The lack of signature, there are many Vincent pictures without signature. We

don't know his thinking of when he signed, when he didn't sign.

I see his touch in it, but again, like all the others, like the variants, it

a different quality.

But he wanted his variants to have different qualities, one from another.

It was thoroughly studied by the Van Gogh Museum, and they have proved that

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 sort of 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 Farrokh 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

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're sensitive to light.

And 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

some tiny microscopic samples. We had some idea of the pigment mixtures that

been used.

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

we considered making a digital reconstruction that would approximate

as they could have been originally.

But what we decided to do... was to actually have a physical reconstruction

of the painting, trying to understand the original build -up of the painting

Van Gogh and what he was trying to achieve at the different stages of

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 the painting,

because Van Gogh did not varnish his paintings, but his impact is quite

And in the other reconstruction, we wanted to go back and find the original

color scheme that Van Gogh used in his painting. And for that, it was important

that we use the same pigment, so similar pigment.

The problem is that these paints aren't sold anymore.

They're toxic or they're unstable, so you can't buy them.

And they had to be made.

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.

So we had to check whether there was enough or that enough could be made and

estimate how much, because... You can't paint lightly when you do a Van Gogh.

There's really a lot of impasto and you have to feel secure that there is going

to be enough paint.

But I had not used these chrome yellows and these uranium lakes before. Normally

I do more medieval reconstructions.

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

were much brighter than I expected. I knew there would be yellow paint and

orange paint, but 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

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 coming out. And that's hard since the

original is not that bright.

You also have to spend time with the painting to have it open up to you, to

up yourself, to develop a sensitivity to the painting.

So that's the case with these Van Gogh paintings.

I think I wasn't a big fan just when I was studying art history, but I really

got to love him, and I see how much poetry is in his way of applying paint,

his decisions of the colours he uses. He's painting all the time, so he...

He has not to think about how he applies a brushstroke. It's just going

automatically and I have to think. So that's a big difference.

So I don't really reach that emotional state.

But what always happens is that you, at a certain moment, start to understand

the painting and that you start feeling, oh, he's searching for something and

he's combining these things and this is what's happening. So you feel close to

the artist.

But of course, I'm a different person. I'm a woman. I'm living 100 years later.

And these sort of things are also the case.

So that's making it so difficult, but also so interesting.

So when painting, especially with these pigments that have all these different

properties, it's also that you're not completely mastering the paint. The

has its own will, doing things you sometimes don't want it to do.

So I looked at the cross -sections, and then I mimicked these mixtures. So

that's lead white, lithopone, some ultramarine, yellow ochre.

But, I mean, that's like four pigments. But within these four pigments, you have

an enormous amount of variables in how much you add in color tones.

For example, with the purples mixed out of geranium lake, ultramarine, and zinc

white.

The geranium lake in combination with this white, it fades really quickly.

For example, in the signature, I applied it and I had this really nice purple.

But then three days later it was gone and it turned into blue.

Probably was the case in Van Gogh's painting.

And it's quite strange, alienating to see your own painting fade in front of

your eyes.

So all these pigments have different properties, not only in color, but also,

for example, in drying times.

There's a lot of zinc white. That's a slow dryer.

The top contains a lot of ochre yellow, a quick dryer.

So these kind of things you feel and see while painting a reconstruction, you

also have to take into account. So sometimes I had to wait a little bit. In

other moments, I really had to work quickly.

Well, the research has given us a lot of new information about Vincent's

techniques and materials.

For instance, we now know that he used a charcoal to make an underdrawing on top

of the ground. That's visible in infrared reflectography.

We managed to get a much broader understanding of the whole biography of

object,

with what Vincent created this particular painting, but what has

During the painting process, at some point, Vincent must have realized that

didn't have enough height to create the composition.

The top flower, for example, got too near to the edge of the canvas. The

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

over it. So what you see over here are his flushed strokes.

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 brush strokes.

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.

One of the major conclusions of the research is that we cannot take off the

varnish anymore.

So we have to respect that. And the reason is because in some areas the

have mixed into the varnish.

So the interface between the paint layer and the varnish layer on top is not

very clear anymore.

And that would mean that if we would take off the varnish, we would damage

paint, which is, of course, not an option.

People may not even be aware of the effect that this varnish has. This

is tinted, it's also discoloured over time.

Because Van Gogh...

left his pictures unvarnished in the French period. They were not intended to

varnished. And Jo van Gogh -Bommer was adamantly against it. She was really

opposed. She expressed that very clearly.

But after she died, it became a universal measure to varnish van Gogh

and other 19th century paintings, even though that was not intended by the

artist.

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 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

occur during transport, it's decided not to have it travel at all.

Just a few words to tell you that I'm getting along so -so as regards my

and work.

When you visited, I think you must have noticed, in Gauger's room, the two

number thirty canvases of the sunflowers.

I've just put the finishing touches, the absolutely equivalent and identical

repetitions.

However, the unbearable hallucinations have stopped for now.

reducing themselves to a simple nightmare on account of taking potassium

bromide, I think.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is an encyclopedic museum, one of the largest

its kind in the United States.

Our Sunflowers painting joined the collection in 1963.

It was the gift of Carol Tyson, who was a Philadelphian, who was an artist. She

actually traveled to Paris in the 1890s. But along the way, he also became a

great collector, buying both Van Gogh's Sunflowers, great works by Manet, by

Monet, Renoir, and others.

Van Gogh's sunflowers have an extraordinary appeal.

It's at one level, they are a very simple, very spare painting of a group

flowers arranged in a pot, but they continue to enthrall.

The Philadelphia Sunflowers is the only version of the sunflowers in the United

States, and so when visitors come upon it in the galleries, they're surprised.

And I get asked quite often, is it real? Is this the real sunflowers? And they

say, yes, it's one of a number that he painted.

It's 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

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. And so he is making

a number of changes as he goes along to the 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

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... It's perhaps no accident that in the sunflowers you get such a sense of

the decorative.

They're very flattened, picture -planed. There's no shadow, a nice sense of

contour, a very bold color. These are all elements that he would have seen in

Japanese woodblock prints.

There's such an exuberance to paint and to color 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.

I think that comes across in this work. It has tremendous appeal for the sense

that we can see how he's applied paint and the delight he's taken in this sense

of color.

He talks about doing repetitions of the works he'd done earlier, and that

doesn't mean that he was necessarily doing exact copies. He saw repetitions

way of sort of improving on what he'd done earlier, maybe improvising a little

and taking it one step further.

You know, it's often thought that Van Gogh really liked to work from nature

directly from life, and so it does raise an interesting question when we think

that these sunflowers were done in January and that he didn't have flowers.

in front of him.

It's interesting to consider in light of his heated debate that he had with

Gauguin when Gauguin stayed with him the fall of 1888. The two had debated

whether a painter should draw from nature or from the imagination.

And so I've wondered a bit whether Van Gogh, in turning back to the sunflower

motif in January, he wasn't trying his hand at some of Gauguin's argument and

thinking, okay, I won't work directly from nature, but I'll try to work from

memory or from my imagination. or from these earlier versions.

And so maybe he was stretching himself a little bit by trying to free himself

from working always in front of the motif.

Something that I think we see in the Philadelphia picture, both in the sense

color, a sense of impasto, the paint that he's brought to it, quite stylized

work, one that has a great deal of kind of rhythmic brushstrokes. So you get the

sense that he's not observing necessarily from life, but that he's

something he'd seen over the summer and seeking to kind of improve on it, maybe

sort of build some of the intensity of the color and the effect of these 14

blooms.

The Philadelphia picture is very different in sensibility from the London

picture. It's more delicate, it's more refined in certain ways. It doesn't have

that brutal energy of London, but it has a sense of

contemplation almost in it. And so to be able to know those two shows me

how various this series of pictures is.

The sunflower paintings are a moment at which Van Gogh, having worked, having

struggled for so long, having suffered so much, finally finds the motif

that is central to his imagination, and he goes to town with it.

The yellows were experimented. It was very difficult to paint a basically

monochromatic picture.

Keeping forms distinctive when you're basically using the same color

is far more difficult.

And he can take this motif of the flower of the South and turn it into something

really monumental.

On top of that, a lot of modernism has been predicated on this idea of eternal

struggle, and this is the chief story in that psychodrama.

The actual work of art, the actual painting, often has a physical dimension

people are surprised to experience, having seen it a hundred times in

reproduction, to realize that the actual picture has a three -dimensional

quality, has a kind of sculptural quality as paint builds up and then

away, and that there is no...

comparison at the end of the day between the reproduction and the actual

physical object, which is a physical object.

He received very good feedback on sunflowers from people like Dugas, from

like Gauguin himself, saying he was on to something.

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

the same motif, and you think, well, they look very similar to each other.

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

particular the three yellow and 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 them. They're not exact replicas of each other.

Each one is different.

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

why particular works become iconic above the other ones.

But it's not just a personal thing because it's a very broad thing, a

phenomenon.

This light yellow, it's sort of very optimistic painting and the way it's

painted, it's with these very swirling brush strokes, sometimes really rapidly

in the background. It's a very invigorating painting, lots of positive

The Sunflowers is the rock star painting in our collection, where merely being

in the present 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, and 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

extraordinary life.

And if you stand in front of the sunflowers, you have a feeling of the

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

bath.

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

But at present I'm not giving up.

And I am plodding on.

Quietly.