Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm. The National Gallery, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The National Gallery, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Sunflowers
Vincent van Gogh · 1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 92.1 × 73 cm
- Held by
- The National Gallery, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Starry Night
Museum of Modern Art, New York
What to look at
These were decoration, in the most literal sense: Van Gogh painted a series of sunflower canvases to hang in the small yellow house in Arles, specifically in the room he was preparing for Gauguin's arrival. He wanted a wall of yellow. The ambition here is a technical one — to make a picture that works using almost nothing but one colour, varied only by temperature and by how thickly the paint is put on. The background is a pale greenish yellow, the table a slightly warmer one, the vase splits across the middle into two yellows, and the flowers run from near-white to ochre to a brown that is really burnt orange. The only relief is the thin blue line he draws around the vase and the signature. The flowers themselves are at every stage from fully open to gone to seed, which stops the picture being merely pretty: half of them are dying.