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In Van Gogh’s mind, sunflowers evoked summer, Provence, and passion for life. For him, they were a direct reflection of the sun. They could also be interpreted as a symbol of friendship, gratitude, and the cycle of life as, in his compositions, we can often see different stages of the blooms. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers appeal to many. The fascination exerted by van Gogh’s stay in the south of France in 1888-1889, his friendship and fallout with Paul Gauguin, his mental health, and the seven sunflowers canvases he painted during that time remain a tremendous source of inspiration in many forms of popular entertainment as well as for artists, museum curators, and scientists in general. Biologists have studied how bees interact with those paintings [ 4], the genetic fabric of the sunflowers [ 5], doctors have attempted to associate his medical conditions and related treatments to his perception of colors [ 6, 7, 8]. Of direct relevance to the paintings themselves, scientists and museum curators have used a broad array of traditional and state-of-the-art techniques to look at and below the paint surface itself [ 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]. Of special interest, we advise the reader to consider the recent book, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers Illuminated published by the Amsterdam van Gogh museum that summarizes the results of the research undertaken by an international team of scientists, curators, and art historians aimed at comparing the F454 Sunflower from the London National gallery with one of its repetitions, F458 from the van Gogh museum [ 18]. In this paper, we approach the same problem of comparing F454 with its repetitions F457 and F458 from a very different perspective. Instead of analyzing the canvases and the paint surfaces directly, we study high resolution images of the paintings using a data science approach. The availability of large collection of digital images of paintings has opened the door to the use of state-of-the-art supervised machine learning techniques in art, for understanding the artist's style [ 19], for classifying paintings [ 20], to detect forgeries [ 21], and possibly for even creating art [ 22]. Our approach to analyzing one of the Sunflowers painting and two of its repeats differs as it is unsupervised. We consider a painting based on a high-resolution image of it. This image is a collection of pixels, with each pixel characterized by its location and color. The color is quantified based on the RGB color model. This is an additive color model in which Red, Green, and Blue lights are added together to reproduce any colors. In a digital image, the amount of each R, G, and B color is discrete, usually an integer in the range [0, 255]. As such, a pixel in an image belongs to a discrete color space of size \([0, 255] In May 1889 Van Gogh painted Irises, a close-up view of flowers in the garden of an asylum. He had come to this retreat on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence after mutilating his ear, following a row with Gauguin in the Yellow House in Arles.

On the day after his arrival, Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, saying that he already had two paintings “on the go”: one of a lilac bush and the other of “violet irises”. Irises is now among the greatest pictures in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The Final Series

The year 1886 was pivotal for Van Gogh’s floral art. That year he moved to Paris and was able to start visiting the Louvre. Among the works he admired the most were those by Eugène Delacroix, including floral still lifes. Van Gogh began to realize that painting flowers as subjects could be very attractive to buyers, so he started his adventure with colorful bouquets. For Van Gogh, flowers were also a tool to express admiration. Japanese art was among his favorite, and as Van Gogh once admitted, it made him happy. The artist explored the Japanese technique of printing and produced some floral artworks recalling Japanese ​​esthetics. They combine Van Gogh’s love for flowers as symbols of life, his admiration for Japan, his skills with color, and curiosity about technical novelties. Bailey has written a number of other bestselling books, including The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh's Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, available in the UK and US ), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence(Frances Lincoln 2016, available in the UK and US ), Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, available in the UK and US ) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, available in the UK and US ). Bailey's Living with Vincent van Gogh: the Homes and Landscapes that Shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, available in the UK and US ) provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, available in the UK and US ).

Life at the asylum was very tedious for the inmates, with little to break the monotony. The appearance of an artist—especially one who was a foreigner—must have caused great excitement. “They all come to see when I’m working in the garden”, Vincent added in his letter. That’s because there are multiple versions, painted within two series. During his life, Van Gogh always maintained a habit of creating multiple versions on a certain theme, in particular of his dearest subjects. The second Sunflowers series is probably one of the most renowned and best-loved around the world. It consisted of seven paintings, five of which depict the same bouquet in a yellow vase. They were painted between 1888-1889, during Van Gogh’s stay in his beloved Arles, Provence. The Sunflowers were meant to decorate the guest room in his house, for the expected visit of his friend Paul Gauguin.

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It is believed that during the summer of 1886, Van Gogh produced over 35 floral paintings. His brother Theo wrote that people who knew Vincent were donating him flowers every week. As mentioned, flowers and bouquets are among Van Gogh’s favorite subjects. It is still not clear today exactly how many floral canvases he painted. Many of the most important museums in the world exhibit at least one of Van Gogh’s flower compositions. However, we know that some of the paintings he created were destroyed (during World War II for example), others were lost, and some remain in private collections. It is tragic that Six Sunflowers was destroyed in the Second World War. But thanks to this recently rediscovered 1921 print, we can at least see the painting as Van Gogh intended. Other Van Gogh news These still lifes depict flowers in various stages of bloom. Even though most of the them are in full bloom, some roses have already fallen onto the table in both versions, and some irises appear dry. Once again, the paintings symbolize the cycle of life, the fact that death is coming for everyone and is part of our existence. It seems that Van Gogh accepted it and continued to cure himself and his thoughts through art.