Although when exactly Van Gogh painted the repeats of sunflowers is debated (analysis varies from early December 1888 to his time at the Saint-Remy in the summer of 1889), these reproductions retained and possibly enhanced the initial vividness. from the first series of sunflowers.
Although Vincent Van Gogh had already painted a series of sunflowers the previous fall to decorate his yellow house in Arles, France, he was forced to abandon work on the series before he felt it was complete. On this first series of sunflowers, he began work each day at sunrise and worked quickly to capture the vivid colors of the sunflowers before they withered. When he arrived in September 1888, the sunflower season was over.
Most likely, in early December, Vincent would return to sunflowers on a yellow background, using (as Gauguin did for his sunflower painter) a canvas cut from the remaining jute, primed with a white lead base (this painting is now in the Sompo museum in Tokyo, Japan). Seeing this version of the Sunflowers as a product of this particular conjuncture, and in the context of Gauguin sunflower painter, helps explain several apparent anomalies. Vincent did not mention it in his correspondence, but he did not refer to any photographs after December 4; he did not sign it, but in fact he signed only two works on jute. It departs stylistically from its August predecessors to some extent, but is in keeping with other November/December works and, as in several of the Roulin family portraits, Vincent uses a tracing of his earlier image to transfer the composition to the new one. canvas. Vincent’s silence regarding the second Yellow on Yellow Sunflower and Gauguin’s small portrait of Van Gogh points to a particularly tense moment in their relationship. Various technical aspects of the new Sunflowers suggest Vincent’s resistance to Gauguin. He applied very thick pigment in general, whereas in the August still lifes he had painted many areas with a thin layer; the application here is more direct and the handling rougher (somewhat as a result of the coarse jute). Second versions of Vincent’s compositions often seem noticeably more sketchy than his prototypes, but here he imitated the original fairly closely, simplifying some details but carefully duplicating many nuances of form and brushwork.
Despite profound differences of opinion, the artists’ continuing mutual admiration provided the necessary incentive for each to continue to interact with the other. Gauguin remained fascinated, if also maddened, by Vincent’s work and ideas, and Van Gogh’s two series of sunflowers served as a kind of lightning rod for his mixed feelings.
Van Gogh was convinced that Gauguin was “completely in love” with these canvases. Among the most startlingly worded compliments he paid them was “Ca… c’est… la fleur” (“This… this is the flower) – his implication being that Vincent hadn’t just depicted the flowers, but but he had managed to distill its very essence, conveying a kind of Flower metaphysical ideal.
After Van Gogh’s violent outburst and Gauguin’s departure for the winter, Van Gogh decided to make more copies of his original sunflowers. Knowing that Gauguin would love to have a copy of the yellow-on-yellow sunflowers, Vincent granted Theo permission to display the pair of sunflower canvases at Boussod et Valadon, suggesting that they be priced at five hundred francs each, a trusted mark in London. his own achievement.
Repeating both Sunflowers for Gauguin, Vincent proceeded differently from December’s yellow-on-yellow version on jute. In that case, he apparently tried to improve August’s prototype by using thicker paint and brighter chromaticism, while respecting most details of form and brushwork. Now, early in 1889, he simplified each form to a schematic essence. Retracing the earlier versions again, he regularized the patterns of the stripes, depicting the petal shapes more clearly so that they rhythmically align with each other and contrast with the systematic impasto of the double flowers. Going a step beyond naturalism, he eliminated any sense of realistic lighting and introduced purely artificial colors (cold blue, bright red, and acid green) into the flower centers. These revisions differ from Gauguin’s formal ideals, and, as if to rekindle admiration for him, January’s yellow-on-yellow Sunflowers are the yellowest of all.
Like Edvard Munch would later do with The Scream and other works, Van Gogh often repainted earlier works to preserve a copy of an original painting or simply to try to repeat an earlier success or recapture a moment in time. Some of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers repeat series may show an artist trying to get his bearings after a disastrous winter in which he was hospitalized after cutting off part of his ear and threatening Gauguin with a knife.
Perhaps more famous than the original paintings, with the repetitions of sunflowers Van Gogh enhances his ‘yellow on yellow’ or ‘light on light’ color scheme used in the original sunflowers. Layer after layer of heavily pasted tints are stacked on top of each other to amazing effect. Whereas in the original Sunflower series, Van Gogh still clung to overtly complementary colors to highlight foreground flowers against a blue or teal background, these iterations unabashedly scream yellow; it’s as if he looked at the previous year’s work and decided to turn up the volume on everything.