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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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