A painting that shattered auction records in 1987 now hangs behind a sheet of plexiglass that has had tomato soup thrown at it. This episode reads Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers as a biographical roadmap rather than a decorative image. We begin in Paris between 1886 and 1888, where the first sunflower paintings showed gritty cut flowers going to seed on the ground, two of which Paul Gauguin acquired. We explain why the sunflower in particular: a revolution in synthetic pigment had produced chrome yellow, a luminous lead chromate that had never existed on canvas, and Van Gogh claimed the flower as his signature subject in an art world where others had already staked out the peony and the hollyhock.

In Arles in the summer of 1888 he painted at a frantic pace to decorate the guest room of the Yellow House for Gauguin’s arrival, escalating from three flowers on turquoise to five on royal blue to twelve on blue-green and finally fifteen sunflowers on a yellow background. When the friendship collapsed in early 1889 and Gauguin asked for one of the canvases, Van Gogh refused and instead painted repetitions of his own work. We follow the triptych he designed around La Berceuse, shown in Brussels in 1890 and recreated by the National Gallery in 2024, and the turbulent afterlife of the individual canvases.

• Van Gogh’s letters to Theo comparing his creative appetite to a Marseillais devouring bouillabaisse
• Size 30 canvases, roughly 36 by 28 inches, and the immersive room they were meant to fill
• The five-flower version destroyed in a 1945 air raid on Ashiya, Japan
• Owners who altered the paintings, including Emile Schuffenecker adding canvas strips to all four sides of the Tokyo version
• The 1987 sale to Yasuo Goto for roughly 40 million dollars and the 2022 and 2024 protests at the National Gallery