Van Gogh, "Sunflowers"

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

One of the greatest and most controversial Post-Impressionist painters of the 19th century was the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh. "Sunflowers" is the painting that made him famous throughout the world.

The History of the Creation of the World Masterpiece Series

In 1888, in May, Van Gogh rents a small house in Arles, on Place Lamartine, he will later depict it in the painting “The Yellow House”. He dreams of creating a haven for artists who are close in worldview and spirit, a school of fine arts, in which everything would have its own style, and his sunflowers would hang on the walls, half a dozen paintings with only these yellow flowers.

Waiting for the arrival of Gauguin, Van Gogh paints his first sunflowers. A lively and bright picture symbolized the joy of meeting a friend. They weren't calm and silent flowers, they were screaming! They shouted with gratitude about everything that the artist felt then. Then there were more sunflowers, many more sunflowers! For Van Gogh, they represented something more than just flowers in the sense with which we are accustomed to treating them. In a letter to his brother Theo, the artist wrote that he considers the peony to be Jeannine's favorite flower, the mallow is Kvota, and the sunflower, in a sense,belongs to him. Van Gogh paints two cycles of paintings: Paris (1887) with lying flowers and Arles (1888) - with flowers in a decanter. It is unlikely that anyone will be able to answer with accuracy what exactly inspired the maestro to love sunflowers, but it is well known that schizophrenics are very fond of yellow, it is not for nothing that mental hospitals are painted in it.

A little about the unsurpassed painting technique of the great Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh's painting "Sunflowers" is made with a special painting technique - impasto. Its essence is that oil paints are applied in a very thick layer using not only traditional brushes, but also a knife. The strokes are scattered across the canvas at random. The rough, embossed surface of the picture conveys all the artist's insides, all the power of feelings and experiences. For an artist, a brushstroke is a kind of gesture, facial expression, intonation. By these restless and defiant strokes, one can determine the state of mind of the “speaking”. Van Gogh was a very talented artist and a deeply feeling person.

"Sunflowers" - a picture in which he tries to convey the duality of being, the struggle of opposites, the merging of drama and festivity. Van Gogh painted sunflowers rather quickly. But even faster the petals fell from them, and the flowers withered. Therefore, along with childishly cheerful flowers, bright orange heads are also depicted, devoid of petals.

Van Gogh. Sunflowers have been blooming on his canvases for 125 years

Vincent van Gogh lived a difficult life full of suffering, disappointment and madness. The most prosperousher time, which passed in southern Arles, was marked by the writing of seven masterpieces, seven paintings with yellow flowers. Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", like the "Sistine Madonna" for the legendary Raphael, "Gioconda" for the unsurpassed Leonardo da Vinci and "Black Square" for the avant-garde Malevich, became decisive and were of tremendous importance in the work of this great artist. The most famous of the series painted in Arles is currently in the National Gallery in London.