‘It’s a type of painting that changes… the more you look at it,’ Van Gogh wrote about his sunflowers.
What do you say, does it change the longer you look? Or the more you see it?
🖼️ ‘Sunflowers’, 1888 © Van Gogh Museum
Van Gogh Museum
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Van Gogh Museum
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Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam houses the world’s largest Vincent van Gogh collection: paintings, drawings, letters and more.
- Vincent didn’t paint this work just because he loved nature. Almond trees bloom early in spring and symbolise new life. In 1890, that new life had just entered his own family. His nephew, Vincent Willem, had been born. Overjoyed, Vincent wrote: ‘It gives me more pleasure than I
- A few fun details you might overlook! 👀✨ Did you ever notice Vincent’s signature (and the date ‘88’) in this self-portrait, on the stretcher on the easel? 🖋️ (2) This orange-red signature was likely the last thing he added. 🎨 We can guess this from a clue in the painting. If
- Tiny drawings, big intentions 🤏💥 In his letters to his brother Theo, Vincent added small sketches, quick, simple, but telling. These ‘postage stamp’ drawings refer to his studies of peasant heads from Nuenen. He returned to these faces to experiment with light, shadow, and
- Let’s sit with these thoughts for a moment 💬 ‘We know so little about life that we’re not really in a position to judge between good and bad, just or unjust, and to say that one is unhappy because one suffers hasn’t been proved. […] So take it as it is, wait with confidence and
- ‘This canvas absolutely kills all the rest.’ Van Gogh wrote about ‘The Harvest’. Showing us ‘old gold, bronze, copper…’ under a ‘heated white-hot’ sky. For Vincent ‘The Harvest’ marked a breakthrough, he felt he was finally ‘on the right track’. He felt this work was proof he
- A symbolic harvest 💀🌾 Van Gogh painted the wheat fields of Auvers-sur-Oise. To him, this painting symbolized the final harvest, death and resurrection. ‘Humanity would be the wheat being reaped,’ he wrote to Theo in 1889. 🖼️ © Toledo Museum of Art
- A 'small' difference 📐 Vincent created three versions of 'The Bedroom,' with a smaller one intended as a reproduction for his mother. He wanted to show her where he lived, and was proud of the room he had refurbished. The painting you see here is this smaller version, and it is
- A cracked skull 💀 Canvas was expensive, so Van Gogh painted the skull over an earlier work. Look closely, and you’ll spot cracks below the skull. These formed because he used slow-drying zinc white to cover the first painting, causing the top layer to crack over time. (2)
- Once you see it, you can’t really unsee it 👀 In Auvers, Van Gogh sketched an Egyptian-style sphinx above a gateway again and again, but with more life and expression each time. He was fascinated by ancient Egypt’s ‘serene’ figures, and that look may have slipped into his
- In his final weeks in Auvers, Vincent van Gogh often returned to the wheatfields. Under stormy skies, he painted vast stretches of land, in his words holding ‘sadness, extreme loneliness.’ So it’s not strange that these landscapes are often perceived as dark or foreboding. But
- Without family, no Van Gogh Museum. Theo supported his brother (1) Vincent throughout his life, helping him continue to paint. After their deaths, Theo’s wife Jo van Gogh-Bonger (2) brought Vincent’s work to the world by organising exhibitions and publishing his letters. Their
- When Vincent wrote this, ‘modern life’ looked very different, yet the feeling is easy to recognise. He probably experienced anxiety as something in the air: not owned, but absorbed, shaped by the pace and pressures of the time. Perhaps that’s why the line still resonates. Not
