Sunflowers

Sunflowers is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh, painted in Arles in January 1889 and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (The Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson, Jr., Collection, 1963). It measures 92.4 × 71.1 cm.

Van Gogh first painted bouquets of sunflowers in a vase in August 1888, completing four canvases in a single week before the flowers wilted. He meant them as a decoration for the Yellow House, where he hoped to work alongside Paul Gauguin, and told his brother Theo that the whole scheme would be a symphony in blue and yellow. One of the four, with twelve flowers against a turquoise ground, is now in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. After Gauguin had left Arles, Van Gogh returned to the subject in January 1889 and painted three repetitions, which he called absolutely equal and identical copies. The Philadelphia picture is the repetition of the Munich canvas, painted from memory in midwinter; the museum stresses that it is a fresh interpretation rather than a mechanical copy, giving each flower a distinct character. In all, seven Arles sunflower canvases were made, five of which are in public collections today.

The flowers range from full bloom to drooping, seed-heavy heads, set in an earthenware jug against flat turquoise and a yellow tabletop, and the jug carries his signature, Vincent. Van Gogh linked the colour yellow with sunlight, the south and Christ as the light of the world. That January he also pictured the sunflower canvases hanging on either side of his portrait of Madame Roulin, wife of the Arles postman, known as La Berceuse, like torches or candelabra, forming a triptych.

That arrangement was realised at the National Gallery in London in 2024, when the London and Philadelphia Sunflowers flanked the Boston Berceuse. In 2026 the Philadelphia Museum of Art again showed its canvas beside the London version of August 1888 in the exhibition Van Gogh's Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow.