Sunflowers Gone to Seed

Sunflowers Gone to Seed, painted in Paris in 1887, predates the famous Arles Sunflower series by a full year and shows Van Gogh working with the sunflower motif as a Paris still-life subject before it acquired the decorative grandeur of the 1888 canvases. The sunflower-gone-to-seed is a different image from the full-bloom versions: rather than exuberant, it is elegiac, the plant's beauty spent and its function shifting from flowering to fruiting. Van Gogh was engaged at this time in intensive colour theory experiments with Bernard and Signac, and these Paris sunflower studies served as exercises in working through the full chromatic range of yellow. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds this as a key work in the evolution toward the Arles series.

Van Gogh's brushwork is intensely physical — thick impasto applied in swirling, directional strokes that give the seed-heavy sunflower heads equal energetic presence with the surrounding stems and leaves. His palette in this Paris study ranges through the full chromatic spectrum of yellow — from pale lemon to deep amber-gold — set against greens and blues in the complementary pairings that his colour theory studies were making central to his practice.