Sunflowers before Arles

The record dates Still Life with Four Sunflowers to 1887, in Paris. This matters because the sunflower canvases are routinely spoken of as though they were all painted in Arles. The record here disagrees: of the twelve works in this catalogue whose titles name sunflowers, seven are dated 1886 or 1887, three are dated 1888 and two 1889. The Paris sunflowers come first, and they are a different group of pictures from the vases painted in the south.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 60 x 100 cm — markedly horizontal — and it is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The measured palette resolves to yellow. The title counts four flowers; the later Arles and Saint-Rémy canvases are counted in the record too, as five, twelve, fourteen and fifteen. Those numbers are how the versions are told apart.

The value of the count

A catalogue arranged by chronology is obliged to keep versions separate rather than merge them into a single famous image. Here the record gives four handles for doing that: the number in the title, the year, the dimensions, and the collection. Applied to the sunflowers, they yield twelve distinct entries across four years and several countries, not one picture seen twelve times.