Sunflowers

Driving to Arles one summer, in search of Van Gogh’s yellow house (sadly destroyed by a bomb in the last war) we came across fields of sunflowers, their heads turned to the sun as their French names, tournesol, implies.
When Vincent came to live there, he wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘Gauguin was telling me the other day he had seen a picture of Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, but he likes mine better'.
He had started painting sunflowers in1887 from cottage gardens on the outskirts of Montmartre. When he arrived in Arles he began a series of paintings to decorate Gauguin, his friend’s room: ‘great pictures of sunflowers, 12 or 14 to the bunch.’ He had to work quickly ‘for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do them in one rush’. Unable to complete the series, he painted three more canvasses inspired by his earlier paintings and from memory the following winter. Less than two years later his tragic life was over. His doctor friend, Paul Gachiet, brought a magnificent bunch of sunflowers to the artist’s funeral because ‘ Vincent loved them so much’ and his coffin was covered in masses of yellow flowers, sunflowers, included.
‘The sunflower is mine in a way,’ Van Gogh had written, finding ‘consolation in contemplating them’. Since then, many artists including Gauguin have painted sunflowers in homage to him, about whom Gauguin wrote: ‘those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed warmth’. Perhaps that need is in all of us, as Albert Camus wrote, to find ‘an invincible summer’ in the ‘depths of winter’.
I have a large china jug with Dr. Johnson’s words inscribed: ‘When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.’ I enjoy filling it with rustic flowers, home-grown in Woodford. As summer fades and autumnal leaves start to litter the pavements, I look forward to packing it full of sunflowers once more.

(Article first appeared in St. Mary’s Parish Magazine)