Still Life with Sunflowers

Still Life with Sunflowers (c.1901) at an unknown location is Gauguin's direct, late engagement with Van Gogh's most famous motif — the sunflower that Van Gogh had made iconic through the Yellow House series of 1888. Van Gogh had died in July 1890, just over a decade before this canvas was painted, and Gauguin's complex feelings toward him — guilt about the Arles breakdown, genuine grief for the loss of a friend, competitive awareness of Van Gogh's growing posthumous reputation — animated several late works that returned to specifically Van Gogh-associated imagery. Where Van Gogh's sunflowers were painted with violent impasto strokes radiating from each flower's center, Gauguin's treatment was characteristically flat and controlled. The comparison was implicit and deliberate: two different answers to the same pictorial problem, two different temperaments, two different visions of what painting after Impressionism could achieve. The work's unknown location reflects the wide dispersal of Gauguin's minor works through the market.

The sunflowers are arranged in a ceramic container with the flat, simplified handling of Gauguin's mature still-life style. The warm golds and browns of the flowers are set against a background of blue-green. Unlike Van Gogh's directional impasto, Gauguin's strokes are more even and the paint surface flatter.