Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers

In August 1888 Van Gogh was decorating the little Yellow House in Arles, getting it ready for Gauguin to come and share it. He wanted a whole wall of sunflowers and worked fast in the summer heat, painting a short series of them. This one held five blooms in a plain earthenware vase, and you can only see it now in old photographs. In the 1920s it was bought by a collector in Japan. On the 6th of August 1945 the house where it hung, near Osaka, was hit in an American air raid, and the painting burned with it. The canvas was large, and by the time the fire took hold there was no way to carry it out.