This summer my daughter and I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see something rare: two of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers hanging side by side. One belongs to the museum. The other came from the National Gallery in London.
The story behind them starts in the summer of 1888, when Vincent was waiting for a friend. Paul Gauguin had agreed to join him in Arles, in the south of France, and Vincent wanted the guest room to feel like a welcome. So he painted sunflowers, a whole series of them, to hang on the walls.
A few things I didn't know before that visit:
- London's painting had never been to America. The National Gallery has lent it abroad only four times since buying it in 1924. This was its first trip across the Atlantic.
- It was a thank-you. In 2024, Philadelphia lent its Sunflowers to London, the first time the painting had left the museum since 1963. This summer, London returned the favor.
- He called the sunflower his flower. Other painters had their signature blooms (peonies, hollyhocks), and Vincent wrote to his brother Theo that the sunflower was, in a way, his.
- The Philadelphia painting is a repeat. The visit with Gauguin ended badly that December, and Vincent landed in the hospital. In January 1889, still recovering, he went back to his sunflowers and painted new versions of them. Philadelphia's, with its blue-green background, is one of those.
- Count the flowers. London's has fifteen sunflowers on yellow. Philadelphia's has twelve on blue-green.
- The yellow is slowly changing. Van Gogh used a newer pigment called chrome yellow, which darkens with light over time. The sunflowers we see today aren't quite the ones he saw.
Left: Sunflowers, 1888, National Gallery, London. Right: Sunflowers, 1889, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Seeing them together, you notice they're the same subject and the same yellow vase, painted months apart, before and after the hardest season of his life.
What struck me was that he didn't paint something new after things fell apart. He went back to what he loved and made it again. That isn't starting over. It's coming home to yourself.
Standing there with my daughter, I loved having two versions of the same thing side by side, one a little younger and one a little wiser. It felt like the right company.
Is there something you return to when life gets hard? A recipe, a walk, a song? That might be your sunflower.
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