The story
In a Tokyo gallery, behind glass, hangs one of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers, a version the Dutch painter made in Arles in southern France when he repeated his famous still life of yellow blooms in a vase. On 30 March 1987, at Christie's in London, the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance company bought it for about 5.8 billion yen, roughly three times the previous auction record for any painting. The firm was about to mark its centenary.
Its museum had opened in 1976 on the 42nd floor of the company's headquarters tower in west Shinjuku, built around the work of Seiji Togo, a Japanese painter known for his elegant, softly stylised women. In 2020 it moved into a six-storey building of its own at the foot of that tower and took the name SOMPO Museum of Art, after the insurer's present-day group.
The Sunflowers has company. Paul Gauguin's Les Alyscamps, painted in Arles in the autumn of 1888 while he was sharing a house with van Gogh, and a still life of apples and a napkin by the French painter Paul Cézanne belong to the same collection. Togo's own canvases are part of it too, and the museum also holds one of Japan's largest groups of paintings by Grandma Moses, the American farm woman who took up painting in her late seventies.
