Sunflowers Gone to Seed

In November 1887 Van Gogh talked the owner of a cheap restaurant at 43 avenue de Clichy into lending him the dining room, and hung something like 100 of his own canvases there alongside work by a few painter friends. His sunflower still lifes from that summer were among them. Paul Gauguin, just back from Martinique, saw them and proposed a trade, one of his Martinique landscapes for two of the sunflower pictures.

This is a smaller one from the same run of four, and it stayed in the family. There is no vase and no bouquet, only cut heads already gone to seed, lying flat against a plain background.

The restaurant show ended in a quarrel with the owner. Van Gogh got hold of a hand-barrow and wheeled the whole exhibition back to his studio on the rue Lepic.