How Many Sunflowers Did Van Gogh Paint? A Guide to the Paris and Arles Versions

Vincent van Gogh painted not one Sunflowers but two whole series. The first, made in Paris in 1887, shows cut sunflowers lying on the ground; the second, made a year later in Arles in the south of France, shows a bouquet of sunflowers standing in a vase. Counting the canvases recorded for each, that comes to four Paris pictures and seven Arles vases, painted between August 1888 and January 1889. One of the Arles vases was destroyed during the Second World War, so the famous "vase of sunflowers" you see in museums is one of several closely related versions.

What the paintings show

The Paris pictures are close-ups of a few flower heads lying on their side, their seeds and petals filling the canvas. They were Van Gogh's first paintings with "nothing but sunflowers", although sunflowers had already appeared in some of his earlier still lifes and landscapes.

The Arles pictures are the ones most people know. A plain earthenware vase holds a crowded bunch of sunflowers, set against a flat background of yellow or blue-green. Look carefully and you will see that the flowers are at every stage of life: some fresh and open, some heavy with seeds, some drooping and withering. The paint is laid on thickly. According to the National Gallery in London, this layered paint evokes the "texture of the seed-heads".

Who was Van Gogh, and why sunflowers?

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. In little more than ten years he made about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. He was not successful while he lived, and his younger brother Theo supported him with money and hundreds of letters, which are our best source for what Vincent thought about art.

The sunflowers are tied to one person in particular: the painter Paul Gauguin. In 1888 Van Gogh rented four rooms in the "Yellow House" in Arles and dreamed of turning it into a studio shared by artists. When Gauguin agreed to come, Van Gogh decided to decorate the guest room for him. He wrote to Theo: "In the hope of living in a studio of our own with Gauguin, I'd like to do a decoration for the studio. Nothing but large sunflowers."

Painting at top speed in August 1888

Van Gogh worked fast because his models would not wait. In a letter of August 1888 he said he was painting "with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse", working every morning from sunrise, "because the flowers wilt quickly". He painted four versions in about a week.

The four August pictures do not match his own description exactly. The second was enlarged and two flowers were added in the foreground, and the third and fourth show fifteen or sixteen flowers rather than the dozen he mentioned. These changes were painted wet-in-wet, so experts treat them as his own reworking. Gauguin arrived on 23 October 1888, and he even painted Van Gogh at work in a picture called The Painter of Sunflowers.

The January 1889 repetitions

The friendship did not last. It ended after a confrontation in December 1888, when Van Gogh, in a rage, cut off part of his own ear. Yet only weeks later, in January 1889, he was back at work repeating his sunflower pictures. Two of these repetitions copy the fourth August version: one is in Amsterdam, with a strip of wood probably added at the top by Van Gogh himself, and the other is in Tokyo, enlarged on all sides with later strips of canvas.

He also imagined the sunflowers as part of a bigger design. He planned to hang two of them on either side of a portrait called La Berceuse (The Lullaby), so that they would look like "torches or candelabra" beside it. This triptych was finally shown as he intended at the National Gallery in London in 2024.

A yellow that was new

Part of what made the pictures fresh in their time was the colour. The series was considered innovative for its range of yellows, partly because newly invented pigments made new colours possible. Van Gogh himself saw the sunflower as his personal subject. He told Theo that other painters were known for the peony or the hollyhock, "but I have the sunflower, in a way".

Where are the Sunflowers now?

Because there are several versions, the answer depends on which one you mean. Two Paris versions that Gauguin received in exchange for his own work are now in the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Among the Arles vases, one is on long-term loan to the National Gallery in London, one is in Munich, one in Philadelphia, one at a museum in Tokyo and one in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which also holds a Paris study. Another Arles version is in a private collection, and one that went to a collector in Japan was destroyed in an air raid on 6 August 1945.

Stories around the paintings

In the 2000s some people questioned whether the Tokyo version was really painted by Van Gogh, suggesting it might be the work of Émile Schuffenecker or Gauguin. Most experts, however, conclude that it is genuine. In October 2022 two climate activists threw tomato soup at the London version and glued their hands to the wall. The painting was behind glass and was unharmed, apart from minor damage to the frame.

Why it still matters

The Sunflowers are a picture of hope and of time passing at once. Van Gogh painted them to welcome a friend and to fill a house with light, yet he chose flowers that wilt within days and showed them fading. He did not live to see their success: he died in July 1890 at the age of thirty-seven, and only later became one of the most famous painters in Western art. Today the series is perhaps his best known and most widely reproduced work.

Learn with the Sunflowers: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
in full bloom	completely open (of flowers)	Some sunflowers are in full bloom.
to wilt	to droop because it is dying or dry	The flowers wilt quickly in summer.
with gusto	with great energy and enjoyment	He painted with gusto every morning.
a labour of love	hard work done because you care	The Yellow House was a labour of love.
on loan	borrowed for a time	The London version is on loan to the gallery.

Try this: Describe some flowers in your home or street in three English sentences, using "in full bloom" and "to wilt".