Four Withered Sunflowers

Everyone pictures the Van Gogh sunflowers standing bright in a vase, but those came later, in Arles. This is where the sunflowers begin. In the late summer of 1887, in Paris, he laid cut sunflower heads on a table and painted them close up, gone to seed, their petals dropping and their thick centres turned toward him. He made several of these studies that season. The aim was the same as with the other flowers he was painting then, a way to push colour and thick, loaded brushwork as far as he could, though the sunflower handed him a bigger, coarser shape than a daisy or a rose. He worked the seed-heads in ridged, circling strokes you can still follow with your eye. The four heads he shows here are well past their bloom, heavy and dry and gone almost entirely to seed.