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Over one week in August 1888 Van Gogh painted four canvases of sunflowers in Arles, and this is the one with twelve of them against a turquoise ground. He was decorating a room. Gauguin had agreed to come south and share the yellow house on the place Lamartine, and Van Gogh wanted the guest bedroom hung with sunflowers before he arrived. He wrote to his brother Theo that he was at work on them every morning from sunrise, because the flowers wilt so quickly. Gauguin reached Arles in October, stayed two months, and painted Van Gogh sitting at an easel with a vase of them. The following January, with Gauguin gone, Van Gogh went back and repeated the best of the August canvases, which is why versions of this picture now hang in London, Amsterdam, Philadelphia and Tokyo as well as Munich.