In August, 1888 Vincent van Gogh began painting a series of works which, as Dr. Jan Hulsker suggests "perhaps more than any other of his paintings, have made him known throughout the world. They are often the only works with which he is identified."¹ This series is, of course, the sunflowers.

Van Gogh envisioned his sunflower works as a series and worked diligently on them in anticipation of the arrival in Arles of his friend, Paul Gauguin. In a letter to Emile Bernard written around 18 August 1888 Vincent wrote: "I am thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen pictures of "Sunflowers", a decoration in which the raw or broken chrome yellows will blaze forth on various backgrounds--blue, from the palest malachite green to royal blue . . ." (B15).

Vincent eventually planned a dozen sunflower works to be hung in the Yellow House which he and Gauguin would use for a studio. "I would like to make a decoration for the walls. Nothing but large sunflowers . . . Well, if I carry out that plan, there will be a dozen panels of them. The whole thing will therefore become a symphony in blue and yellow. I work at it every morning from sunrise, for the flowers wilt quickly and it is a matter of doing the whole thing in one go" (526). Unfortunately, Vincent's race against the changing seasons was unsuccessful and he was only able to complete four sunflower works in August, 1888, including the work featured on this page.

Without question, the most valuable resource with regards to insights into the development and execution of Van Gogh's works are his letters to his brother, Theo, and others. In his typically detailed and precise manner, Van Gogh describes the origin of the first three works in this series: "I have three canvases on the stocks; 1st, three large sunflowers in a green vase, light background (size 15 canvas) [A]; 2nd, three flowers, one flower which has wilted and lost its leaves and one in bud on a background of royal blue (size 25 canvas) [B]. The last one is light on light and will, I hope, be the best[C]" (526). A few days later Vincent writes in Letter 527: "I am now working on the fourth painting of the sunflowers. This fourth one is a bouquet of fourteen flowers and has a yellow background."[D]

The four works mentioned above are noted as "A" through "D" and further details are shown in this table below:

Koyata Yamamoto was born in Osaka, Japan on 19 January, 1886. At the age of 19 he graduated from high school and was hired by the Osaka branch of Satsuma & Co. and assigned to the cotton textile division. In the years to follow he would found his own cotton textile companies. In 1919, the year before he purchased the Van Gogh sunflowers, he founded the Yamamoto Sholen Corporation, managing the Osaka branch as the executive director.

Koyata Yamamoto (left) and Saneatsu Mushanokoji (c. 1935).

Yamamoto had a great appreciation for the arts and occasionally wrote poetry. In 1915, when Yamamoto was 30-years-old, he read a novel "When He Was Thirty Years Old" by writer and artist Saneatsu Mushanokoji. The novel made such an impression on Yamamoto that he read many more of the author's works and eventually forged a strong friendship with him. It was a result of Mushanokoji's influence, rather than an affinity toward Van Gogh's works, that prompted Yamamoto to purchase the sunflower painting. Mushanokoji (through his friend Moritsu Hosokawa) had arranged the purchase of a Cézanne self-portrait for 20,000 yen and was very interested in acquiring the Van Gogh sunflowers as well, but had been unsuccessful in finding a Japanese buyer. Yamamoto, touched by his friend's passion, agreed to purchase Van Gogh's sunflowers for 20,000 yen.

The sunflower painting was shipped from France to Japan on the mail steamer Binna. The steamer departed on 21 May 1920 and arrived in Japan later that year sometime around 12 December. Early in 1921 the painting appeared in the first of only two brief exhibitions in which it would be displayed in Japan. The painting was well received by the Japanese public, especially at the second exhibition in Osaka where it attracted more attention than the many other works on display. Strangely enough, it was the painting's large frame that had a profound impact on its fate. During the Shinanobashi exhibition the unusually heavy frame caused the painting to fall from the wall. The frame was damaged and Yamamoto was so outraged that he never allowed it to be exhibited again. Sadly, the same frame may have had a role to play in the painting's tragic fate.

Yamamoto was worried about the heavy bombing in the last years of World War II and asked a bank in Osaka to store the Van Gogh sunflowers painting in its basement. The bank refused on the grounds that the delicate work would be damaged by the basement's humidity. So Yamamoto kept the painting in its usual place on the drawing-room wall of his residence in the Uchide district of Ashiya. In 1945 Ashiya was subject to four air raids by the American military: on 11 May, 5 June, 15 June and finally on 5-6 August. In this final air raid (occurring at the same time as the atomic bombing in Hiroshima), 89 people were killed and 2,833 homes were completely or partly destroyed. Yamamoto's house burned to the ground and Van Gogh's Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers was destroyed. There is speculation that the painting's heavy frame may have made it too difficult to move and some believe that this was instrumental in the work's destruction.

Yamamoto survived the Ashiya air raids and later in life would support the promotion of poetry groups such as the Ashiya Haiku Society. He left behind a number of his own haiku compositions under the pseudonym Kodo. After World War II he never once mentioned his much loved Van Gogh painting. Koyata Yamamoto died on 25 November 1963 at the age of 77.

F 459 "Tournesols" Sunflowers on royal blue background (6 blooms).

Oil / wood, probably canvas first, later mounted on wood and increased to 98 x 69 cm.

F 459 shows a grass-green vase with three sunflowers on an azure background on a table of light violet, arranged like F 453, now however enriched with further blooms, that are draped in the foreground around the foot of the vase: this painting is definitely the second one described in letter 526 "sunflowers" with "3 flowers one flower gone to seed and leafless & one bud on a royal blue background size 25 canvas." (Compare with F 453).

Admittedly there is always a reservation to this identification, Van Gogh's statement "size 25 canvas" is in contradiction to the recorded data for F 459. De la Faille didn't see any possible way to solve this contradiction. Hulsker was inclined to believe that the size statement was an error of Van Gogh's. Roskill (in agreement with A. Tellegen, formerly RKD) reached the same conclusion, that F 459 is identical to the second version in letter 526, but was no longer in the condition described there: He suspected an addition at the picture's top edge, meaning he thought that a retouch had been done when it was later mounted on wood; however Roskill abstained from elaborating on his description of his observations and on a overall evaluation of the results.

The recorded measurements for F 459 are without parallel in Van Gogh's Oeuvre and are very strange – there is no such size in the French standard formats, which Van Gogh had almost exclusively used since 1886; it is close to a "size 30 canvas" or a "size 40" in "paysage" format (92:65 as opposed to 100:73). If F 459 (98:69) was this size, however, Van Gogh only rarely used it, and in Arles he only used the smaller "Paysage"-format, (the "size 25 canvas"), otherwise without exception (!)for larger pictures he used the "size 30 canvas" in the Figure size.

Admittedly the recorded measurements would become more plausible if wood actually had been used as the bearer material. However, this would stand completely in contradiction to Van Gogh's statements in letter 526 – and would prove unique, although Van Gogh seems to have occasionally painted on wood in his early career: De la Faille lists barely 20 works in a smaller format on this bearer material, admittedly these statements are to be treated with caution: possibly they are on cardboard, which Van Gogh definitely did use, and concerning any montages on wood; the last and only works on wood from Van Gogh's French period were done in Paris (F 335 & F 336, both painted on oval teabox covers).

In order to bring Van Gogh's remark with letter 526 in agreement, Roskill's supposition consequently appears justified. F 459 was mounted on wood later by the artist himself in a unique case, (this certainly has occasionally happened to Van Gogh's works, usually only posthumously however, for "conservation" reasons), and the revision postulated by Roskill points in this direction. Roskill assumed that this would have brought about more significant extensive changes in the original conception.

However, under the circumstance, six sunflowers are depicted on F 459, but only five are spoken of in letter 526. One of the unmentioned "boutons" in the foreground, i.e. either the middle or the right bud) is assumed to have been inserted into the composition later.

Overwork marks on F 459 – still visible as a retouch even on photographs, on the basis of the characteristic refraction of the pure color values of deep blue and yellow to half tones with wet on wet corrections - show in particular (a) at the tops of the petals on the right upward reaching sunflower and (b) in the area of the three draped blooms on the table. In both these areas there is a bulge or break in the color layers, visible on photographs as a dark shadow line – both horizontal, approximately parallel to the edges: (a) the upper shadow line runs across the entire picture width, cutting through the petals of the right upper sunflower. Roskill has interpreted this strip above the bulge line as an additional piece. (b) the lower bulge is only halfway between the left and middle sunflower in the foreground, and becomes overlapped by the lower petal points of this left bloom. If this indicates the original picture edge, this line would trim the sunflowers only in a minor way in the two corners, namely in the petals; therefore this sub edge caused only minor changes to the composition and therefore was done to – in view of the retouch in this area – accommodate the additional foreground motifs that Letter 526 did not mention.

The distance between the two colour bulges, in other words between the upper and lower edges of the original composition, presumably measured 81-83 cm, which would correspond to the "size 25 canvas" measurement in the above format (81:65 cm).

However, this theory is to be taken only as an assumption, since (a) it is not known whether the recorded dimensions were the true edge measurements of F459, which must be assumed for this conclusion and (b) none of the available reproductions of the picture shows the actual edges, therefore each illustration could have an unknown amount trimmed from the left, right, lower and probably the upper edges.

If one puts the recorded dimensions of 98:69 cm uncorrected into relationship with those of the available reproductions (assuming the dimensions of the reproduction are correct), they result in distance values between 83,5 and 85,5 cm. If one takes the trimmings at the edges into account as well as the deviations from traditional data and reproductions from the relationship, then the values would be between 81,5 and 84 cm. Since the distance between the bulges is inversely proportional to the size of the conjectural edge trimmings (the larger the distance between the bulges is assumed to be, then – mathematically – the less the reproductions are allowed to be trimmed), the photographs should not be trimmed to a greater distance than approximately 84 cm: the distance therefore must be smaller. For the ideal distance (81 cm) edge trimmings of the original calculate to approximately 2-5 cm. This should approximate the actual circumstances.

With this situation, we accept Van Gogh's words in letter 526 and will have to agree that originally F 459 was conceived as a composition with five sunflowers on a "size 25 canvas", before the canvas was enlarged and the sixth bud was inserted into the composition ( for which the canvas was added to on the stretcher, although perhaps it was not enough to attain the desired enlargement of the format, so that it became necessary to mount it on wood at the same time?)

This revision must have been done , as there are indications of light wet on wet retouching, before the oils were dry on the canvas, therefore soon after the announcement of the picture (letter 526), maybe in context of the "Aureole" (letter 527): the version with royal blue background F 459, introduced in letter 526 in which it was conceived, was therefore already finished and changed to its final setting by the end of the week of 19th to 26th August 1888.

From the beginning assigned to the Décoration of the yellow house, these are "suns on royal-blue background" and cited shortly afterwards expressly as "one of the decorations" (letter 527): F 459 proves to be the reference point indeed for the two "size 30 canvas" F 454 and F 456. The enlargement of the format was done with the intent of adjusting the picture so that they were both "size 30 canvases", a plausible purpose.

Nevertheless, in a later mention of "sunflowers" (letter 534f) F 459 is no longer included. This should show that Van Gogh in the end gave up on the second sunflower picture, which had caused him some effort, to use for his Décoration.

(Translation courtesy of Bob Harrison.)