The third of this month’s sunstruck pictures is Vincent Van Gogh’s Fourteen Sunflowers in a Vase, painted in Arles during the height of the summer of 1888. Earlier that year the artist had moved from Paris to Provence, where his perennial sense of loneliness was mitigated by the pleasure of daily exposure to the southern sunshine. Van Gogh responded exuberantly to the unfamiliar climate and landscape, which made him feel as though he had never really seen vivid colour before. “Under the blue sky the orange, yellow, red splashes of flowers take on an amazing brilliance, and in the limpid air there is a something or other happier, more lovely than in the North.”

The artist’s favourite colour was yellow, which to him represented the essence of summer, warmth and life. “Just now we are having a glorious strong heat, with no wind, just what I want,” he wrote to his brother Theo in early August 1888. “There is a sun, a light that for want of a better word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!” By the middle of the month he had found a subject which would enable him to express his passion for the colour. “I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaise, which won’t surprise you when you know that what I’m at is the painting of some big sunflowers. I have three canvases going… I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.”

Altogether he managed to paint four pictures before the flowers faded, the painting reproduced on this page being the last in the series and, in Van Gogh’s own...

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