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This is one of five versions of Sunflowers on display in museums and galleries across the world. Van Gogh made the paintings to decorate his house in Arles in readiness for a visit from his friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin.

'The sunflower is mine', Van Gogh once declared, and it is clear that the flower had various meanings for him. The different stages in the sunflower's life cycle shown here, from young bud through to maturity and eventual decay, follow in the vanitas tradition of Dutch seventeenth-century flower paintings, which emphasise the transient nature of human actions. The sunflowers were perhaps also intended to be a symbol of friendship and a celebration of the beauty and vitality of nature.

The sunflower pictures were among the first paintings Van Gogh produced in Arles that show his signature expressive style. No other artist has been so closely associated with a specific flower, and these pictures are among Van Gogh's most iconic and best-loved works.

'The sunflower is mine', Van Gogh once declared. Soon after his death he became known as the painter of sunflowers, an identification that endures to this day. No other artist has been so closely associated with a specific flower, and his sunflower pictures continue to be among Van Gogh's most iconic - and loved - works.

This painting is one of five versions of Sunflowers on display in museums and galleries across the world, although Van Gogh painted seven versions in total between 1888 and 1889. Of the seven, one is in a private collection and has not been exhibited for generations. The other, bought by a Japanese collector in 1921, was destroyed during the Second World War. In addition to the National Gallery's painting, the four other versions on public display are in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Sompo Museum in Tokyo.

The seven pictures were made in two groups: four were painted in August 1888 and three replicas were painted in January 1889, which Van Gogh described as 'absolutely equal and identical copies'. These copies, along with the original paintings, were to be used as side panels to versions of his portrait of Madame Roulin, the wife of the Arles postman. Van Gogh painted the first four versions of his sunflowers in just one week. He worked quickly before the flowers faded, writing to his brother Theo, 'I am painting with the gusto of a Marseillaise eating bouillabaisse ... If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow.' The first two paintings to be completed were the one now in a private collection and the painting destroyed by bombing. The second two paintings - Fourteen Sunflowers (Munich) and the National Gallery's picture - are the most important of the series. Van Gogh considered both good enough to hang and signed them 'Vincent', using his first name only as people found it difficult to pronounce his last name. They were also among the few works he felt confident enough to exhibit in Brussels in November 1889.

Van Gogh had previously painted sunflower still lifes, but was prompted to paint this series by the imminent arrival of Paul Gauguin, his friend and fellow artist, at the 'Yellow House', his rented home in Arles. Van Gogh was anxious to please his guest, who arrived on 23 October, and he knew Gauguin liked his sunflower pictures. As he explained to Theo, 'I would like to do a decoration for the studio. Nothing but large Sunflowers' (although he changed his plans and hung two pictures - this one and the Munich painting - in the guest room which Gauguin was to use). Van Gogh hoped that Gauguin's arrival would be the first step in forming a new 'association' of like-minded artists, a 'Studio in the South'. However, following a fight on 23 December, when Van Gogh threatened Gauguin with a knife and then cut off part of his own left ear, Gauguin returned to Paris. Although the friends never saw each other again, they continued to write, and in one letter Gauguin asked Van Gogh to make a sunflower painting for him. While living with Van Gogh, Gauguin painted the portrait Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). The scene was imagined, as the sunflower season was over and Van Gogh did not work on his sunflower pictures at all during the two months Gauguin was in Arles.

Gauguin may have admired Van Gogh's sunflowers - in 1887 he had exchanged one of his Martinique landscapes for two of Van Gogh's small sunflower studies - and yellow may have been his favourite colour, but the flower also had significance for Van Gogh himself. In this painting the 15 sunflowers are in different stages of their life cycle, from young bud through to maturity and eventual decay and death. The bud in the lower left corner has yet to reach full flower, seven flowers are in full bloom and the other seven have lost their petals and are turning to seed. Van Gogh has brilliantly captured the textures of the flowers in these various stages. Long strokes follow the direction of the petals, leaves and stems, whose sinuous lines echo those of Art Nouveau; small raised dabs of stippled paint imitate the bristling seed heads. Here, especially, Van Gogh exploited the stiff consistency of the new oil paints introduced in the nineteenth century to create thick impasto effects.

The sunflowers' life cycle follows the vanitas tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting, but the sunflower had also been associated with love, both sacred and profane, since the sixteenth century. This was because just as the sunflower turns to follow the sun, so the true believer follows Christ and the lover follows the object of their affection. This idea could be extended to other instances of devotion, such as the subject who follows a leader or to the notion of art following nature. For Van Gogh, the sunflower's association with art and love may have included the idea of artistic friendship or partnership, which he hoped to forge with Gauguin. The sunflower may also have had even more personal meanings for him. In February 1890 he wrote to the critic Albert Aurier, suggesting that the two sunflower pictures he was exhibiting in Brussels (the Munich and London versions) might 'express the idea symbolising "gratitude".' Symbolism aside, sunflowers were also visually striking examples of the beauty and vitality of nature, with which Van Gogh had always had a strong bond.

The paintings were also important artistic statements, not least because they were among the first paintings Van Gogh produced in Arles that show his signature expressive style. In this painting Van Gogh limited his palette to just one primary colour - 'a picture all in yellow' as he described it - although yellow here ranges from rich orange ochre to the pale greenish yellow of the background. Yellow could signify happiness for Van Gogh, and it was also the colour of Provence and a tribute to the Provençal painter Monticelli who 'depicted the south [of France] all in yellow, all in orange, all in sulphur'. Van Gogh, too, has created a similar effect of incandescent heat, particularly with the circular seed heads, which seem to stand in for the sun itself.

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Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888. Read about this painting, learn the key facts and zoom in to discover more.

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Please use the below sentence starters

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You can either listen to or read this article. This article gives you some background info on Vincent van Gogh.
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Improve your students' reading comprehension with ReadWorks. Access thousands of high-quality, free K-12 articles, and create online assignments with them for your students.

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1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4" (73.7 x 92.1 cm)
Vincent van Gogh: Emotion, Vision, and A Singular Style
Mention Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890) and one of the first things likely to come to many people's minds is the fact that he cut off his own ear. This stark act, committed in 1888, marked the beginning of the depression that would plague him until the end of his life. But to know van Gogh is to get past the caricature of the tortured, misunderstood artist and to become acquainted instead with the hardworking, deeply religious, and difficult man. Van Gogh found his place in art and produced emotional, visually arresting paintings over the course of a career that lasted only a decade.

Largely self-taught, van Gogh produced more than 2,000 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sketches, which became in demand only after his death. He also wrote scores of letters, especially to his brother Theo, in which he worked out his thoughts about art. "Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that's the real way to learn to understand art better and better," he wrote in 1874. "Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see." ¹

It was nature, and the people living closely to it, that first stirred van Gogh's artistic inclinations. In this he was not alone. Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art. Driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city, many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand, feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work. Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside; his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones.

In 1886, van Gogh moved to Paris, where he encountered the works of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and the Pointillist compositions of Georges Seurat. Inspired by these artists' harmonious matching of colors, shorter brushstrokes, and liberal use of paint, he brightened his own palette and loosened his brushwork, emphasizing the physical application of paint on the canvas. The style he developed in Paris and carried through to the end of his life became known as Post-Impressionism, a term encompassing works made by artists unified by their interest in expressing their emotional and psychological responses to the world through bold colors and expressive, often symbolic images. In a letter to his sister Willemien, touching upon the mind and temperament of artists, van Gogh once wrote that he was "very sensitive to color and its particular language, its effects of complementaries, contrasts, harmony." ²

By 1888, van Gogh had returned to the French countryside, where he would remain until his death. There, close once again to the peasants who had inspired him early on, he concentrated on painting landscapes, portraits (of himself and others), domestic interiors, and still lifes full of personal symbolism.
Observation and Imagination in The Starry Night (1889)
"This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night (1889). ³ The window to which he refers was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he sought respite from his emotional suffering while continuing to make art.

This mid-scale, oil-on-canvas painting is dominated by a moon- and star-filled night sky. It takes up three-quarters of the picture plane and appears turbulent, even agitated, with intensely swirling patterns that seem to roll across its surface like waves. It is pocked with bright orbs-including the crescent moon to the far right, and Venus, the morning star, to the left of center-surrounded by concentric circles of radiant white and yellow light.

Beneath this expressive sky sits a hushed village of humble houses surrounding a church, whose steeple rises sharply above the undulating blue-black mountains in the background. A cypress tree sits at the foreground of this night scene. Flame-like, it reaches almost to the top edge of the canvas, serving as a visual link between land and sky. Considered symbolically, the cypress could be seen as a bridge between life, as represented by the earth, and death, as represented by the sky, commonly associated with heaven. Cypresses were also regarded as trees of the graveyard and mourning. "But the sight of the stars always makes me dream," van Gogh once wrote. "Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star." ⁴

The Starry Night is based on van Gogh's direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions. The steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland, not in France. The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. At once balanced and expressive, the composition is structured by his ordered placement of the cypress, steeple, and central nebulae, while his countless short brushstrokes and thickly applied paint set its surface in roiling motion. Such a combination of visual contrasts was generated by an artist who found beauty and interest in the night, which, for him, was "much more alive and richly colored than the day." ⁵

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MoMA | Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889

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If you have a printer you can head to this website and print off any of these.

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Have fun with free printable colouring pages of famous Vincent van Gogh masterpieces: The Bedroom, Sunflowers, Almond Blossom and much more

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Coloring Pages of Van Gogh's Bedroom, Cypresses, Cottages, Flowering Garden, Haystacks, Mulberry Tree, Starry Night, and Sunflowers by artist Marin Mercer.

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Check out this student friendly art lesson!

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Make Your Own Starry Night - Step by Step Tutorial for Making a Starry Night Crayon Resist

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Kids Can Draw: Starry Night Age 6-12 (patron spots now available)

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I prefer Starry Night because it looks a lot cooler and it looks like it took a lot more effort. I also like how amazing it looks with all the swirly stars and how they don't look the way stars do in other pictures.  -Riley

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In my opinion I like Starry Night better because I like how it is so swirly.

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In my opinion I like Starry Night better because I like how it is so swirly.

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my opinion is that the starry night is good art because i like it-mia

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i love the starry night because its not plain neither is the mona lisa its so beautiful - izzy :)

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In my opinion i prefer the sunflowers by Vincent Van. Godh because the flowers look like the sunflowers that are in my grandma´s yard

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In my opinion i prefer the sunflowers by Vincent Van. Godh because the flowers look like the sunflowers that are in my grandma´s yard

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Alonzo

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l just thing the picture is nice

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I prefer starry night because I prefer cool colors over warm colors it also makes me happy
-Addy

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Thank you for sharing your opinion! I noticed you have an opinion statement AND a reason! Great work!

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Thank you for sharing your opinion! Now let's take you statement and expand on it...let's build a stronger sentence by adding a reason. "I prefer The Starry Night painting because _____________."

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Thank you for sharing your opinion AND for using an audio file! Great work! Let's expand on your reason... "I prefer The Starry Night because the art is _____________." So maybe instead of saying "it is really good art" you could talk specifically about a part of the painting you enjoy the best! For example, "I prefer The Starry Night because the swirly stars are very interesting."

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Thank you for sharing your opinion! I also prefer cool colors to warm colors. I find them to be calming. You are ready to move on to writing a 2nd opinion/reason as to why you prefer The Starry Night over Sunflowers. Maybe revisit the webpages with the art pieces and look more closely at the differences in the two.

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Yes! I agree- The Starry Night is not a plain painting! Thank you for sharing your opinion! Can you expand on why The Starry Night is not a plain painting? What specifically makes it not plain?

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Great start! You clearly state your opinion but let's work on having a specific reason for thinking it is a good piece of art. What about it appeals to you?

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I also enjoy the swirly stars! Thank you for sharing your opinion! Is there anything else in the painting that is swirly? Can you expand on the swirly thoughts?

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Thank you for sharing your opinion! It does look like it has more detail to it than the Sunflower painting! What else do you like about it? What else is swirly?

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My opinion.

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I like the Starry Night painting because it relaxes me.

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I like the Starry Night painting because it relaxes me.

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:JUDE:}

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I like the Starry Night painting because it relaxes me.

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i  like stary night because its so butifull and coming

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i  like stary night because its so butifull and coming

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l love sunflowers because it makes me fell like it is a warm sunny day in the country