Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers

The Sompo Museum sunflowers have one of the most remarkable modern provenance histories of any Van Gogh work. Painted at Arles in late 1888, this version of fifteen sunflowers in an earthenware vase was sold at Christie's in London in March 1987 for £24.75 million — then the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting, shattering all previous records and initiating the modern era of nine-figure Old Master and Impressionist sales. The buyer was the Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company, which donated it to what is now the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo, making it a symbol both of Japanese economic power at its 1980s peak and of the global dispersal of European art through post-war markets. Van Gogh made this painting as part of his scheme to decorate the Yellow House for Gauguin's arrival — a room of sunflowers whose yellows would create an environment of warmth and light. Gauguin praised the sunflower paintings when he arrived in October 1888, one of the few artistic compliments he offered during their difficult collaboration. The Sompo sunflowers are now one of the most visited paintings in Japan, their astonishing auction price having given them a cultural meaning beyond their extraordinary pictorial achievement: they became the symbol of a global moment in the art market.

The sunflowers fill the canvas with an extraordinary range of yellows — from pale lemon through mid-yellow to deep ochre and near-brown in the aged blooms. Van Gogh's impasto builds each flower head as a distinct physical presence, the paint applied in thick ridges that create actual texture. The simple vase grounds the composition, its earthenware warmth anchoring the explosion of floral forms above.