The Painter of Sunflowers

The Painter of Sunflowers (1888) at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is the most historically charged portrait Gauguin ever painted — the depiction of Van Gogh at work on the sunflower paintings that would become his most iconic series. The two artists had been living and working together at the Yellow House in Arles for approximately two months when Gauguin made this portrait, and the dynamics of their cohabitation were already complex: Van Gogh revered Gauguin as an artistic mentor, while Gauguin's attitude combined genuine admiration for certain qualities in Van Gogh's work with impatience at his emotional instability. The portrait's Van Gogh Museum location carries obvious irony: Gauguin's image of the artist who would become the most famous and commercially valuable of all Post-Impressionists hangs in the museum dedicated to that artist's memory. Van Gogh reportedly disliked the portrait because he thought he looked mad — a reaction that reveals something about the psychological tension between the two men just weeks before their catastrophic breakdown.

Gauguin paints Van Gogh with his characteristic flat areas of bold color and firm outlines, the figure of the working painter treated with the same Synthetist approach he was applying to landscapes and still lifes. The sunflowers Van Gogh works from are rendered with strong yellows and oranges that dominate the composition's color palette.