These are not the famous Sunflowers, and Gauguin slept beneath two of them

Say “van Gogh’s sunflowers” and everyone pictures the same thing: a bunch crammed into an earthenware vase, yellow on yellow. Those are the Arles paintings, made in 1888–89, and there are five large canvases of them.

This is not one of those. This is Paris, late summer 1887 — two cut sunflower heads laid on their side against vivid blue, a year earlier and a different idea entirely. Nothing is arranged. The flowers are not in a vase; they are lying on a surface, severed, already going over.

Four pictures, and Gauguin took two

The Met records four sunflower still lifes from that Paris summer, and it can place all of them.

There is an oil sketch for this picture in the Van Gogh Museum. There is another two-flower painting, also signed and dated 1887, at the Kunstmuseum Bern. And there is a larger canvas with four heads at the Kröller-Müller Museum — the same museum that holds Café Terrace at Night.

Then the detail that makes the whole essay: Paul Gauguin acquired the two smaller works. And they did not go into storage. Until the mid-1890s they held, in the Met’s phrase, “pride of place above the bed in his Paris apartment”.

He gave them up only when he sold his most prized possessions to pay for the South Seas voyage. That is the measure of what he thought of them — the last things sold, and sold to buy Tahiti.

Why this matters for the famous ones

The Arles sunflowers exist because of this friendship. The Van Gogh Museum records that van Gogh hung the big vase paintings in Gauguin’s room at Arles, that Gauguin was struck by them, and that he asked for one as a gift — a request van Gogh was reluctant to grant.

So the sequence runs: van Gogh paints cut heads in Paris; Gauguin buys two and sleeps under them; van Gogh paints the great vase pictures to decorate the room Gauguin will stay in; Gauguin asks for one and is refused.

The most famous flower paintings in the world are, in part, one painter trying to impress another who already owned his sunflowers.

Reading. The Arles pictures are usually explained as pure colour experiment — the Van Gogh Museum describes them as showing what a single colour can do across its whole range. That is true and it is not the whole story. Reading them as a gesture toward a particular guest arriving in a particular house is an interpretation, and a well-founded one, but the museums record the facts rather than the motive.

What you are actually looking at

Two heads on blue. The blue does the work: sunflowers are the one subject where yellow can go dead, and setting them against a saturated blue field forces every value in the flower to declare itself.

They are cut, and van Gogh has not tidied them. The petals curl, the discs are heavy and seed-dense, the stems end abruptly. This is a still life about a flower after the point of display — closer to a study of decay than a bouquet.

It is also small: 43 by 61 centimetres, a fraction of the Arles canvases. An intimate picture, made for a room rather than a wall.

What isn’t known

• Exactly when in the summer. “Late summer 1887” is as close as the Met goes.
• Whether Gauguin bought or swapped. The Met says “acquired” and leaves the mechanism open.
• Where they went after his sale. Not traced in this record; the Met’s own picture entered the collection much later, by the Rogers Fund in 1949.
• What van Gogh thought of them. No statement of intent survives in the museum’s account.

Worth knowing if you are choosing which sunflowers to live with. The famous ones are a performance of yellow, painted to fill a room for an expected guest. These are two dead flowers on a blue table — and they are the ones that guest chose to hang above his bed.

Own Cut Sunflowers in 4K →
See the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art →