Allotment with Sunflower

Allotment with Sunflower, painted in Paris in 1887, shows Van Gogh encountering the sunflower as a painting subject in the context of the kitchen gardens visible from the slopes of Montmartre. The allotment — a small cultivated plot for domestic food production — was a working-class Paris institution, and the single sunflower growing in its midst combined a subject from the humblest category of urban agriculture with the plant that would soon become his most celebrated motif. Where the Arles sunflowers of 1888 are arranged in vases as purely aesthetic compositions, this garden sunflower is rooted in actual soil among actual crops, connected to the democratic subject matter that had always guided his choice of what to paint. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Van Gogh's brushwork is intensely physical — thick impasto applied in swirling, directional strokes that give the garden plot, the sunflower, and the surrounding city an equal energetic presence. His Paris palette, enriched by his engagement with Signac and Seurat, treats the vegetable garden through complementary colour pairings — the yellow of the sunflower against blues and violets — as an exercise in the chromatic theory he was actively studying.