Artist: Vincent Van Gogh
Date: 1887
Museum: Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, Netherlands)
Technique: Oil On Canvas
Life-sizedThis is an unusual flower still life. Here, Van Gogh does not paint fresh flowers in a vase or pot, no arranged bouquet of different flowers, no entourage and no background; just a few cut sunflowers gone to seed. The flowers are painted life-sized and fill the entire canvas.Colour studiesIn Paris, Van Gogh frequently paints flower still lifes to practice his use of colour. In 1886, he writes to a friend: ‘I have made a series of colour studies in painting simply flowers (…) seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green, yellow and violet, seeking the broken and neutral tones to harmonise brutal extremes. Trying to render intense colour and not a grey harmony’.HighpointIn this painting, he finds what he sought: warm and cold colours in contrasting tones. The combination of these with the swirling brushstrokes in all directions, but also the strange, undefinable space in which the sunflowers are placed, make this painting one of the highpoints of his Parisian period.
Artist |
|
|---|---|
Download |
|
Permissions |
Free for non commercial use. See below. |
 |
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark. This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.
|
Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may
not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the
