Sunflowers

There were no sunflowers in Arles in January. Van Gogh had come out of hospital on 7 January 1889, a fortnight after the night he cut his ear and Gauguin walked out of the yellow house for good, and one of the first things he did back at the easel was return to the sunflower canvases he had painted the previous August to decorate Gauguin's bedroom. This one goes back over the picture now in Munich, 12 flowers against a turquoise ground, worked up in the middle of winter without the flowers in front of him. He treated these repetitions as paintings in their own right and took the heads one at a time, so no two are at the same stage of opening or collapse. In May he left Arles for the asylum at Saint-Remy.