Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers

Van Gogh painted his first sunflower pictures in Arles in August 1888, hurrying to fill the little Yellow House with them before Gauguin came to live and work beside him. That plan came apart within weeks. By late December Gauguin had left, van Gogh had cut part of his own ear, and he was moving in and out of the local hospital. This canvas is one of the repetitions he made in January 1889, working back over an earlier composition he was proud of, 15 blooms crowded into a plain earthenware pot against a yellow wall. He liked the difficulty of yellow on yellow, a whole painting built from one colour warming and cooling across itself.