Two Cut Sunflowers

Van Gogh painted these in Paris in the late summer of 1887, two sunflower heads cut and laid down, already gone to seed. He had spent a year and a half in the city working through what the Impressionists had done with colour, and the sunflower handed him orange against blue at full strength. Pictures of this kind hung for a while in the Tambourin, a restaurant on the Boulevard de Clichy run by Agostina Segatori, with whom he was briefly involved. That winter Gauguin took two of the Paris sunflower canvases from him in an exchange and kept them. Later, when Gauguin wrote asking for one of the big Arles sunflowers in a vase, Van Gogh refused and reminded him he already had two. Gauguin sold his pair in the 1890s to pay for the South Seas. This one passed through the dealer Ambroise Vollard to Degas, and came to Bern with the collection of the Hahnloser family.