Sunflowers, before Arles

The record dates Two Cut Sunflowers to 1887. Twelve titles in this catalogue name a sunflower, and only three of them are dated 1888: six carry 1887, one 1886 and two 1889. The motif most firmly attached to Arles in popular accounts is, in this record, mostly a Paris one — which is exactly the error an earlier version of this site made when it grouped works by words in the title and filed a Montmartre path from 1887 under Arles because the title said sunflowers.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds thirty-four of the ninety-five works dated 1887. No dimensions are recorded. The measured palette reads as ochre and yellow.

Ochre in the second Paris year

Ochre dominates twenty-one of the ninety-five works dated 1887, its joint highest count in the decade alongside 1889. It had appeared in none at all dated 1883 or 1884. The family's return through the Paris years is one of the plainer movements in the measured record, and it belongs to the date rather than to the subject: the catalogue holds sunflower titles in four different years, and their palettes do not agree with each other.