Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers [1887]

Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers [1887], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Sunflowers appear amid the variegated bouquets that were the mainstay of Van Gogh's work in Paris in 1886–88. Intent upon updating his lackluster Dutch palette, he repeatedly turned to painting flowers so as "to render intense colour and not a gray harmony." By the summer of 1887, when he adopted the sunflower as the dominant motif in four pictures, he had found his voice as an original colourist. 

[Oil on canvas, 43.2 x 61 cm]