Van Gogh: Sunflowers

Henri Fantin-Latour, The Rosy Wealth of June, National Gallery, London.

There was an increasing demand for still-lifes of flowers in the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps stimulated by the bright new pigments available and by the taste of the bourgeois customers, who wanted colourful, decorative pictures for their homes. Henri Fantin-Latour was a successful painter who specialised in flower pieces. His painting The Rosy Wealth of June, first exhibited at the Royal Academy, is indebted to the academic tradition, but is also aimed at the popular taste of the buying public. Fantin-Latour had begun his career by copying old masters in the Louvre (Lucie-Smith 12) and his debt to Dutch flower painters like Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum can be seen in the dark background, the placing of the flower bowl on a table edge, the elaborate composition of the flower arrangement, and the harmony of the colours. Nevertheless, Fantin-Latour's painting could not be mistaken for a seventeenth-century painting because of the new pigments in evidence (carmine, chrome yellow), the profusion of roses - which were loved by the Victorians - and the way in which the flowers merge with one another, differing from the crisply painted petals of the old Dutch painters.

Claude Monet, Vase of Flowers, Courtauld Gallery, London 

Claude Monet's painting of A Vase of Flowers illustrates some of the innovations introduced by the Impressionists. Fantin-Latour painted garden flowers, which he brought back to his studio, whereas Monet, an outdoor painter, has depicted a vase of wild flowers, probably wild briar roses and blossom. Monet's love of the open air explains the rarity of such still-life in his work, which he reserved for days when it was too wet to work outside (House 41). Fantin-Latour has smoothed out all his brush marks, while Monet does not try to conceal the individual dabs of paint ("taches") out of which his painting is constructed. The Impressionists wanted to capture the diffused effect of light, and so Monet uses small dabs of the same bright colours, mainly white, red and green, throughout the picture to create an "all over" effect. That is one reason why Monet has placed only two kinds of flowers in his vase, whereas Fantin-Latour has depicted a great variety of blooms.  Monet uses this same technique in many other paintings, such as The Water- Lily Pond, which is likewise built up with small dabs of colour, creating a shimmering melange of red, green and blue.

Van Gogh, Sunflowers, National Gallery, London 

The later paintings of Vincent van Gogh have many features in common with those of Monet and the Impressionists, including visible brushstrokes and bright colours. Flowers feature prominently in the paintings of both Monet and Van Gogh. Monet's still-lifes of flowers were painted for sale by dealers, while those of Van Gogh were often painted for private and personal reasons. The four canvasses of sunflowers were painted as decoration for the walls of the Yellow House in Arles, in the south of France, which Van Gogh had rented using money provided by his brother Theo, and where Van Gogh hoped to establish a colony of like-minded artists. The sunflower paintings must have been like bouquets for the guests. In the event, only one artist - Paul Gauguin - came to stay with Van Gogh in the Yellow House. Years later, Gauguin wrote a moving recollection of the sunflower painting that had been hung in his room by Van Gogh: 


"In my yellow room, sunflowers with purple eyes stand out against a yellow background; the ends of their stalks bathe in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In one corner of the painting, the painter's signature: Vincent. And the yellow sun, coming through the yellow curtains of my room, floods all this flowering with gold" (Gauguin 246).

Like most of us, Gauguin is responding to the brilliant colour and emotional quality of Van Gogh's work. 

In addition to brilliant colour, Van Gogh's Sunflowers is noticeable for its bold design and sense of draughtsmanship. Unlike Monet, Van Gogh believed that drawing was "the backbone of painting" (Van Gogh 183) and made numerous drawings throughout his career as an artist. In the nineteenth century, academies were the most important training centres for artists, and Van Gogh briefly enrolled in the art academy at Antwerp, though he proved unable to draw in the academically approved manner and was put back to the beginners class (McQuillan 43). Van Gogh wrote in a letter to Theo that "it is absolutely essential to be able to draw the proportions correctly and to position objects fairly confidently before you start" on a painting (Van Gogh 187). So it is likely that Sunflowers began with a preliminary underdrawing on the canvas, probably done in charcoal, to sketch the main outlines of the composition. Van Gogh's draughtsmanly approach extends to his whole painting technique. He uses his brush to "draw" firm outlines round his forms and build them with vigorous hatching or thick impasto. In another letter he wrote that "the true drawing is modelling with colour" (Van Gogh 328).  

Van Gogh's approach was not that of an academic artist, as can be seen by his experience at the Antwerp academy. Some of the sunflowers are placed in front of others or seen from the side, to suggest perspective, but the general effect is that of a flat pattern. Van Gogh conveys the essential nature of the flowers through their brilliant colours, their big globular heads, their spiky leaves, and their twisting stems. He gives us a stylised, exaggerated presentation of the flowers, not a more naturalistic picture in the manner of Fantin-Latour: 

"I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn into, well - a lie if you like - but truer than the literal truth" (Van Gogh 306-307).

The sunflowers are placed close to the picture plane. The painter Anton Mauve had warned Van Gogh that he was "sitting too close to your model" (Van Gogh 113) and Gauguin's painting of Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers shows Van Gogh standing only inches away from the flowers. When we are intent upon drawing or painting the object in front of us, we can lose ourselves totally in that object, almost a meditative experience. This must have been the case with Van Gogh, who worked to express "what one feels" (Van Gogh 270), not detached observation. It is also significant that Van Gogh has chosen to depict a group of dying flowers, from which petals have been lost, not a conventionally beautiful vase of flowers. He worked rapidly, like the Impressionists, producing work that must have seemed naïve and slapdash to conventional taste, but which wonderfully conveys the essential nature of the thing depicted. This was also the way of Japanese artists:

"Their work is as simple as breathing, and they do a figure in a few sure strokes as if it were as easy as doing up your waistcoat" (Van Gogh 410). 

Van Gogh collected Japanese prints and may well have been influenced by Hokusai's prints of flowers. Like Sunflowers, these prints of Hokusai display bold compositions, bright colours, plain backgrounds, and close views of the flowers. It is interesting that Van Gogh and Hokusai devote almost as much attention to the stems and the leaves as they do to the blooms themselves, because these help to convey the characters of the different plants. Van Gogh had some understanding of the principles behind oriental art, and did not view it as merely "chinoiserie" type decoration. This willingness to learn from non-western art was an important development in the late nineteenth century. It is also found, for example, in Gauguin's borrowings of poses taken from photographs of Javanese temple carvings and ancient Egyptian frescoes (Thomson 145, 152). 

Sunflowers are not delicate flowers. They have incredibly thick stems, rough leaves which feel like sandpaper, and bright yellow petals. The boldness of Van Gogh's technique is adapted to the roughness of the flowers themselves. As he himself wrote, "sometimes the subject calls for less paint, sometimes the material, the nature of the subjects themselves, demands impasto" (Van Gogh 197). The heads of the flowers are built up with thick impasto, made easier by the thick machine-made paints invented in the nineteenth century, sold in metal tubes. The sunflower petals, each of which seems to have been painted at a single stroke, are so thickly painted that they are clearly differentiated from each other, even though they are all the same chrome yellow colour. The petals have also been retouched along their edges with orange paint. The details of the green leaves have likewise been picked out in darker paint. The brush marks are visible even on the background, which seems to have been added last, because the background paint sometimes goes slightly over the edges of the flowers. Van Gogh would probably have used a round brush to paint the petals and to fill in the background spaces between the flowers. The flat brush - which was another nineteenth-century invention (Art in the Making: Impressionism 93) - is more in evidence in Van Gogh's Long Grass with Butterflies, in which the blades of grass are painted with long streaks and dashes. The brush strokes are here at angles to each other, giving vitality to the painting. This technique of building a picture with small dashes of colour is Van Gogh's own version of Monet's "taches" and Seurat's "pointillism". 

For Van Gogh and the Impressionists, flower painting was a way of experimenting with different combinations of colours. Van Gogh told Theo that "last year I painted almost nothing but flowers, so as to get used to colours other than grey" (Van Gogh 337). Van Gogh's letters are full of references to colour and colour theory, a subject which had developed in the nineteenth century. Blue and yellow are complementary colours which look good together, and Van Gogh refers to "the combination of heavenly blues and yellows in Vermeer of Delft" (Van Gogh 401). In Sunflowers, the bottom of the background wall and some lines round the vase are picked out in blue to contrast with the predominant yellow of the picture. Sunflowers is mainly a study of different shades of yellow, just as Long Grass with Butterflies is a study of different shades of green. The brightness of Van Gogh's palette can be explained by his attempt to capture the bright colours of the Mediterranean landscape, his awareness that pigments can fade with time (Van Gogh 345), and his love of colour for its own sake: "colour expresses something in itself" (Van Gogh, quoted in McQuillan 116). Van Gogh was helped by the bright new pigments available, some of which were derivatives of the textile industry. Van Gogh asked Theo to send him tubes of chrome yellow, cobalt blue, emerald green, orange lead, and zinc white (Van Gogh 446). 

Paul Gauguin, Vase of Flowers, National Gallery, London 

A bold use of colour is also found in the work of Van Gogh's friend, Paul Gauguin. Gauguin's Vase of Flowers, painted in Tahiti, depicts a vase of brightly coloured tropical blooms, appropriate to Gauguin's self-identification with exotic and faraway places. The painting's vivid, clashing colours - red, orange, green, blue, - show that Gauguin was striving for colour contrast rather than colour harmony. Gauguin's writings tell us a lot about his colour theories. For example, he observes that "light comes and changes the look of every local colour" (Gauguin143) - a fact also known to Monet - which means it can be perfectly correct to paint a yellow sea or a blue tree; and he also tells us that bright, contrasting colours can give "vibrant notes" (Gauguin 10) to a painting - which is what Gauguin has done in A Vase of Flowers. 

Gauguin's works were often painted from imagination and contain elements of symbolism. Van Gogh, however, stressed the importance of painting the object in front of you. Van Gogh's Olive Grove was painted in protest at Gauguin's Christ in the Garden of Olives, something which Gauguin could never have actually seen (McQuillan 181). Van Gogh's own paintings, however, sometimes contain a certain symbolism of their own, such as the famous painting of Van Gogh's Chair, which makes us think of its owner.  It has been suggested that the series of sunflower paintings, with the flowers in different stages of decay, stands for the cycle of life (Langmuir 289). Van Gogh told Theo that after painting sunflowers he had turned to painting cypress trees, because they seemed to represent opposite qualities to the sunflowers. It is likely that the sunflowers stood for light and life, while the dark cypresses, often found in graveyards, suggested sorrow and death. Certainly, the bold presentation, bright colours and emotional intensity of the larger-than-life Sunflowers means that this painting is much more than a conventional picture of flowers in a vase. In earlier periods, still-life painting had been considered a "minor" genre, but great paintings like Sunflowers helped to make this artificial hierarchy increasingly irrelevant.

Works Cited

Art in the Making: Impressionism, (exhibition catalogue by David Bomford & others), London: National Gallery, 1990

Gauguin, Paul, The Writings of a Savage, edited by David Guerin, translated by Eleanor Levieux, New York: Viking Press, 1978

Hillier, J., Hokusai: Paintings, Drawings and Woodcuts, London: Phaidon, 1955

House, John, Monet: Nature into Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986

Langmuir, Erika, The National Gallery Companion Guide, London: National Gallery, rev. ed. 1997

Lucie-Smith, Edward, Fantin-Latour, Oxford: Phaidon, 1977

McQuillan, Melissa, Van Gogh, London: Thames & Hudson, 1989

Thomson, Belinda, Gauguin, London: Thames & Hudson, 1987

Van Gogh, Vincent, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Ronald de Leeuw, translated by Arnold Pomerans, London: Penguin, 1996