Sunflowers (series of paintings)
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Sunflowers is a series of still life oil paintings that the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh painted. Among the Sunflowers paintings are three similar paintings with fifteen sunflowers in a vase, and two similar paintings with twelve sunflowers in a vase. Van Gogh painted the first Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, which is now in the Neue Pinakothek Museum in Munich, Germany, and the first Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, which is now in National Gallery, London, England, in August 1888 when he was living in Arles southern France. The later similar paintings were painted in January the following year. The paintings are all painted on about 93 × 72 cm (37" × 28") canvases. An earlier series of four still life using sunflowers were painted in Paris in 1887.
Van Gogh began painting in late summer 1888 and continued into the following year. One went to decorate his friend Paul Gauguin's bedroom. The paintings show sunflowers in all stages of life, from fully in bloom to withering. The paintings were innovative for their use of the yellow spectrum, partly because newly invented pigments made new colours possible. In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh wrote: the sunflower is mine in a way.
In March 1987, even those without interest in art were made aware of van Gogh's Sunflowers series when Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto paid the equivalent of USD $39,921,750 for Van Gogh's Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers at auction at Christie's London, at the time a record-setting amount for a van Gogh. Whether he bought the painting himself or on behalf of his company, the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Japan, the painting currently resides at Seiji Togo Yasuda Memorial Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. After the purchase a controversy arose whether this is a genuine van Gogh or an Emile Schuffenecker forgery.
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[edit] Sunflower still lifes painted in Arles
 Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (Arles, August 1888). Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. |
 Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (Arles, August 1888). National Gallery, London, England. |
 Vase with three sunflowers (Arles, August 1888). Private collection, United States. |
 Vase with five sunflowers (Arles, August 1888). Destroyed by fire in World War II on 6 August 1945. [1] |
 Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (Arles, January, 1889). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. |
 Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (Arles, January 1889). Sompo Japan Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan. |
 Vase with twelve flowers (Arles, January 1889). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, United States. |
[edit] Trivia
In the video game Animal Crossing one of the many paintings that is possible to collect is a Sunflowers painting, however it is named the perfect painting. In its sequel, Animal Crossing: Wild World, the same painting re-appears, but is re-named "Flowery painting".
[edit] External links
- Sunflowers, the complete series of paintings.
- Analysis of two sunflower paintings.
- Account of the controversy over van Gogh forgeries
[edit] References
- Welsh-Ovcharov, Bogomila: The Ownership of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers, Burlington Magazine, March 1998, pp. : listing eleven still lifes of sunflowers, four in Paris and seven in Arles.
- Dorn, Roland: Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' series: the fifth toile de 30, Van Gogh Museum Journal 1999, pp. 42-61.
