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Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which hangs in the National Gallery, were doused with Heinz tomato soup by environmental protesters this afternoon.
Two women from Just Stop Oil, Anna Holland, 20, and Phoebe Plummer, 21, threw two cans over the iconic £76 million painting this morning before sticking themselves to a wall in the London gallery.
Art lovers will be relieved to learn that the painting was “unharmed,” the Metropolitan Police said. In particular, they understand the significance of Van Gogh’s Sunflower Collection and how it culminated in a failure that caused the painter to cut off his own ear.
In total, he painted seven works in the collection, which are scattered around the world – and one was even destroyed at the end of World War II.
Two Just Stop Oil protesters threw cans of tomato soup over the third version of Van Gogh’s sunflower painting this morning before sticking themselves to the wall
The painting in the National Gallery is the third version of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – which he tried so hard to perfect that he had a breakdown
A self-portrait of the Dutch artist, who cut off his own ear shortly before his death after a breakdown
One, unseen in public since 1948, is in the private collection of an unknown millionaire, revealed only to his closest friends. Five others are in museums — in Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Munich, Tokyo (bought for a world record £25 million in 1987) and our own National Gallery in London.
But the seventh was destroyed during World War II. It was called Six Sunflowers and it was painted in August 1888. It was in the collection of a wealthy collector, Koyata Yamamoto, who lived on the Japanese coast when his town was hit by an American bomb on August 6, 1945 – coincidentally on the day that the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
The painting, which hung over the couch in Yamamoto’s sitting room, was obliterated. Yamamoto managed to escape the raging firestorm, but his prized photo—with its heavy frame—was too cumbersome to carry.
But in 2013, nearly 70 years later, a British art historian discovered a color photograph that revealed the work in all its glory.
The print – with its vibrant yellows, glowing oranges, citrus greens and royal blue background – gives us a rare glimpse of what the original might look like.
Missing Link: This Photo of the Destroyed Second Version Found in a Japanese Museum
Art historian Martin Bailey came across the photo while researching a book on the Zonnebloem series. In addition to preserving Van Gogh’s original bold colours, it also showcases the special, heavy, wooden frame specially chosen by the artist.
While most picture frames at the time were white, Van Gogh chose an orange to play against the orange of the sunflowers.
With the rediscovery of the picture of the seventh picture, the full story of the Sunflowers series fell into place. Van Gogh painted them at a critical point in his life.
At the age of 35 he was less than two years from death, his career was an utter failure, his excitement at painting mixed with disappointment, sadness and self-destructive mania.
Before turning to painting, he was an art dealer and teacher in England – in Brixton, Ramsgate and Isleworth – a bookseller in the Netherlands and a missionary in Belgium. The people around him despaired almost as much in his prospects as he despaired of himself.
In one letter, he angrily stated that his family wanted him to become a carpenter, accountant or baker. It’s safe to say that the prospects of becoming a world-renowned artist seemed far off.
His romantic life was an equally great disaster. When he proposed to the daughter of his Brixton landlady, she refused because she was already engaged to a former tenant.
Ten years later, when she proposed to his Dutch cousin, a widow, she replied: ‘Never, no, never.’ (“No, no, never.”)
When she told him that he could no longer see her, he put his hand into the flame of a light and said to her father, his uncle, ‘Let me see her as long as I can keep my hand in this flame. The desperate trick didn’t work.
A relationship with an alcoholic prostitute ensued – and his romantic prospects were not improved by an attack of gonorrhea in 1883. He is also thought to have contracted syphilis.
His violent mood swings were also not helped by a poor diet, which was only rich in absinthe and tobacco. In February 1888, he moved to Arles in Provence, where he took refuge from his misery and hoped that the fresh air would relieve his chronic smoker’s cough.
He signed a lease for the so-called Yellow House, which he would immortalize on so many of his canvases, and began to paint obsessively. And what obsess him most were sunflowers.
A letter written at the time from Van Gogh to his brother Theo, an art dealer, has been preserved.
‘I paint with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse [a local fish soup],’ he wrote, ‘which won’t surprise you when it comes to painting large sunflowers. I would like to do a decoration for the studio. Nothing but big sunflowers.’
And so he started the photos that would sell for millions – but only after his death.
During his lifetime, Van Gogh was painfully aware of how unpopular his work was. In fact, he only sold one painting. Two days after that first letter to Theo, he wrote another: “We live in a time when there’s no market for what we do…I’m afraid it won’t change much in our lifetime.”
Van Gogh not only had an exceptional talent. It was also amazingly fast – the first four sunflower photos were taken within a week. But for all their golden, glowing colors, no one would buy them.
A repeat of painting no. 3 (left): on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and (right) a replica of number four, now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
Desperate, but not yet defeated, Van Gogh continued to work at breakneck speed until the autumn of 1888. He painted a self-portrait, a photo of fellow artist Paul Gauguin who visited him in Arles, and some famous photos of empty chairs.
Relations with Gauguin were stormy and Van Gogh was terrified that his friend would abandon him and leave him alone with his demons in Arles. Then came the blow that derailed him forever.
On December 23, he received a letter from his adored brother, Theo, stating that he was getting married. That same evening, he cut off a piece of his ear in a brothel in Arles, handed it wrapped in newspaper to a prostitute and asked her to “keep this item carefully.”
It wasn’t that Van Gogh hated his new sister-in-law, Johanna Bonger, but he was afraid she would disrupt his close relationship with his brother.
“Vincent was concerned about losing his brother’s support, both emotionally and financially,” art historian Martin Bailey writes in his new book. “And these fears played a key role in provoking his self-mutilation a few hours later.”
By January, Van Gogh had recovered enough to leave the hospital and paint three wintery copies of his summer sunflower photos. But the damage was done and he entered a spiral of self-destruction.
Between February and May, he was back in the hospital, having hallucinations and paranoid fantasies that he was being poisoned. Among local villagers, he had been nicknamed “fou roux,” the crazy redhead.
Final painting of version four, on display at the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan
In May, he was transferred to an asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He stayed there for a year, sometimes appearing to come to his senses, then again with paralyzing relapses.
Though his mind was tormented by visions and delusions, he continued to make bold, ravishing canvases of the neighboring olive groves, vineyards, and cornfields.
Then, in July 1890, two months after leaving the asylum, he shot himself in the stomach in Auvers, northwest of Paris. He chose to do it in the summer cornfields—the landscape he had just painted so memorable. Two days later he died in the Auberge Ravoux, the inn where he stayed.
Biographers still debate the exact causes of Van Gogh’s acute mental state. Some say it was syphilis, which can cause symptoms of insanity, others say it was manic depression or schizophrenia. Whatever the cause, Van Gogh’s mental decline was certainly exacerbated by absinthe, acute anxiety, poverty and malnutrition.
But through this fog of madness, Van Gogh created some of the most extraordinary paintings the world has ever seen.
What is even more remarkable is that these masterpieces came about quite by accident.
On a hot, breathless August day in Arles, the models Van Gogh had hired to sit for him didn’t show up and it was too suffocating to even consider taking his donkey outside.
So he glanced around the Yellow House for inspiration.
He grabbed a handful of sunflowers, already wilting and curling in the heat, and arranged the flowers haphazardly in several green, cream, and yellow earthenware pots.