向日葵花束

Monet cut these sunflowers in his own garden at Vétheuil, the village on the Seine where he was living in 1881, short of money and painting hard. Durand-Ruel, the dealer who kept the Impressionists going in those years, bought the canvas from him on 30 October that year. Monet put the flowers in a Japanese vase, of a kind he collected all his life, and when the still life went into the Impressionist exhibition of 1882 reviewers picked out the brio of the handling. Seven years later it came up in a conversation in Arles. Gauguin had seen it in Paris and described it to Van Gogh, who was painting sunflowers of his own at the time. Van Gogh wrote home that Gauguin liked Monet's better, and added that he was not of that opinion.