Girasoles

These are not the sunflowers most people picture. Van Gogh painted this in Paris in 1887, a year before he moved south to Arles and filled vases with the tall bouquets that made the flower his signature. Here the blooms lie cut on a surface, heavy and already fading, their petals curling. He made four of these Paris studies, trying out the thick strokes and hot yellows he was learning from the city's newer painters. His friend Paul Gauguin admired two of the smaller ones enough to keep them hanging over his bed in Paris, and only sold them years later to help pay for his voyage to the South Seas.