At first nobody wanted them. Van Gogh painted four images of sunflowers in a pot, and then three copies that depart in many details from the originals. Together, they amount to an iconic body of work, representative of his creative powers at their height. Yet the first time one was exhibited in his lifetime it caused uproar.
Having been invited to show work alongside Les Vingt, an avant-garde group of 20 artists in Brussels, in January 1890, Van Gogh consulted his brother Theo as to what he should send. Theo recommended the sunflowers and explained why. “I’ve put one of the sunflowers on the mantelpiece in our dining room. It has the effect of a piece of fabric embroidered with satin and gold, it’s magnificent.” But such richness and beauty, achieved by means of Van Gogh’s stark simplicity and strong colour, was not apparent to others. The artist Henry de Groux threatened to remove his own work from the 1890 exhibition if he found it in the same room as “the laughable pot of sunflowers by Mr Vincent”. As Van Gogh’s artist friends Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac were present when this was said, the evening ended in chaos, and a fight was only narrowly avoided. The next morning, De Groux resigned. To the critic of Le Journal de Charleroi, it was understandable: this artist had been “very justly exasperated” by Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
Today, four of these seven sunflower paintings are in public collections. Two of the four originals can be seen in London from 25 January, when the one belonging to Munich’s Neue Pinakothek joins the one in theNational Gallery. Anyone who tried to buy Christmas cards last year at the National will have been forewarned. Almost half the Christmas merchandise, or so it seemed to this disgruntled visitor, was covered with sunflowers – fridge magnets, drying-up cloths, mugs, table mats, coasters, diaries, address books, even spectacle cloths and cases. When Martin Bailey, the Van Gogh expert and journalist, estimates that about 5 million people see Van Gogh’s sunflowers every year, he is talking about the oil paintings, not the ubiquitous reproductions they have spawned. These may indeed have damaged the authority and originality of the sunflowers, and removed their “aura” to a mythical region associated with the cult of genius, as Walter Benjamin described in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, but many visitors will nevertheless flock to the National Gallery in the next few weeks. The appeal of Van Gogh’s sunflowers seems more pervasive than ever.
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