Sunflowers (original title, in French, Tournesols) are the subject of a series of
still life paintings executed in
oil on canvas by the
Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh. 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.
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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.
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On March 31, 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 work of art.
[1] The price was over four times the previous record of about $12 million paid for
Andrea Mantegna's
Adoration of the Magi in 1985. The record was broken a few months later with the purchase of another Van Gogh,
Irises by
Alan Bond for $53.9 million at
Sotheby's, New York on November 11, 1987.
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While it is uncertain whether Yaso Goto 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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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_%28series_of_paintings%29
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