The Sunflowers Are Mine, by Martin Bailey – review

‘How could a man who has loved light and flowers so much and has rendered them so well, how could he have managed to be so unhappy?’ This was Claude Monet’s comment on seeing Van Gogh’s ‘Three Sunflowers’ (1888). There he put his finger on one of the enigmas of the Dutch painter’s tragic life.

The journalist and scholar Martin Bailey has written an admirable new book which tells the story of Van Gogh’s life and posthumous rise to fame through the pictures of sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, which the painter produced at intervals through his brief career.

Following Monet’s thought, one might go on to wonder how someone as isolated and unpopular as Van Gogh (1853-1890), could have gone on to become so extravagantly celebrated post mortem. Collectively, his ‘Sunflowers’ have a good claim to be the world’s best-loved pictures. Certainly they vie with any by Velázquez, Leonardo, Michelangelo or Rembrandt — the artists Vincent himself so greatly revered — in popular esteem.

Bailey calculates that some five million visitors annually gaze at various versions of the ‘Sunflowers’ in the five public galleries in which they hang in three continents. The floor in front of ‘Fifteen Sunflowers’, the greatest of the sequence, is the most scuffed in the National Gallery, and the postcard of it the museum’s bestselling image.

Yet on its first public appearance this very painting nearly provoked violence. As Bailey records, the opening banquet in Brussels on 18 January 1890 of an exhibition organised by the ‘Les Vingt’ — an association of 20 avant-garde artists — almost led to multiple fatalities. One of the participating painters, a Belgian named Henry de Groux, was so ‘exasperated’ by the sight of the National Gallery ‘Sunflowers’ that he insulted Van Gogh — who was not present, being in the hospital of St Rémy in the south of France, with a few months to live.