Welcome to the Philadelphia Museum of Art...
and the fourth segment of our Facebook Live Event.
I'm Jenny Thompson. I'm curator of European Painting, here in Philadelphia.
And I'm standing in front of the only version of the Sunflowers in the US.
My colleague Nadine in Munich...
just asked me how our painting relates to the version in Munich.
And there are a great number of similarities between these two versions.
The most obvious one, perhaps, is this blue or turquoise background...
behind the flowers. This is also an identical arrangement of flowers.
There are 14 blooms here...
in the exact places that they appear in the Munich painting.
We even have this one falling blossom, with its broken stem on the right.
But there are also subtle differences...
that mark out the Munich and the Philadelphia paintings.
The colours seem to be a little bit stronger in this version.
As if he's punched them up a little bit.
He has given each flower a very strong personality.
And it's perhaps no accident that Camille Pissarro, the impressionist painter...
once commented: Vincent van Gogh's flowers look like people.
There's that sense of personality that comes through here strongly.
Another place in which the Philadelphia painting is quite unique...
is in its pot. This vase that's holding the flowers together.
In all of the other versions...
the lower portion of the pot is a lighter cream colour...
that juxtaposes the yellow top. This is thought to be a preserving pot.
One that's fairly common in the South of France.
It was glazed on the inside, glazed on the upper portion.
But the bottom portion may have been left unglazed...
so the pot could be placed in cold water to keep its contents cool in the summer.
Van Gogh might have been playing off here the construction...
the physical aspects of the pot.
Here he's made the base of the pot a kind of purple. Purplish brown.
And he might be playing again with that sense of complementary colours.
He surrounded the pot with this very bold orange line.
It's also the orange line that marks off the edge of the table.
And then he signed it quite strongly in a red paint: Vincent.
And he liked to sign his paintings this way, because as he remarked to his brother:
People are going to struggle to pronounce our last name.
And you might even notice, if you've been with us for a little bit on this event...
I'm pronouncing Van Gogh using the American pronunciation.
There are yet more subtle differences in the Philadelphia and Munich paintings.
You might see in some of the flowers...
that there's a greater sense of a rhythmic brushstroke.
A sense of patterning.
It's perhaps most pronounced in the centre...
with this flower with this sort of a reddish eye.
We begin to get the sense here...
that Van Gogh might not be looking at real life, fresh flowers.
We know from his correspondence letters he wrote to his brother Theo...
that in January of 1889 he was working on two repetitions of the Sunflowers.
And by repetitions he didn't mean they were strictly copies.
He was coming back to the composition of fresh.
He was looking at ways to innovate, to improvise. And so this painting...
seems likely that it was not done from fresh flowers in a vase...
but that he was returning to the Munich picture...
and looking at ways to change it, to make some alterations.
By January of 1889...
he was beginning to think about perhaps selling the Sunflowers.
He also wanted to have extra versions...
because he and Gauguin were at that point talking about exchanging paintings.
And Gauguin, as you may have heard in earlier versions of the Live Event...
was particularly interested in a version with the yellow background.
But we also know that by the spring of 1889...
Van Gogh was thinking about using the Sunflowers in a different fashion.
He was envisioning a triptych or a three-part ensemble of paintings.
A triptych was a format...
that was very often used in altarpieces for religious paintings.
He envisioned his own altarpiece or religious painting...
involving two versions of the Sunflowers...
flanking a portrait that he called La Berceuse.
'Berceuse' being the French word for lullaby.
And this portrait was of a woman he knew very well in Arles.
The wife of the postmaster Roulin.
He painted a number of versions of her portrait...
but in La Berceuse she is in a green gown...
she's seated as sort of a symbol of mothering.
She has in her hands a rope, which is connected to a cradle.
And there's a sense that she's singing a lullaby.
She's perhaps rocking a cradle as she's doing that, to comfort a child.
And in the letter that Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo in May 1889...
he actually drew a sketch of how he wanted this triptych to appear.
He had one Sunflowers, one with a yellow background on the left...
in the centre was a portrait of La Berceuse...
and on the right was a version of the Sunflowers with a turquoise ground.
Much like the one I'm standing with.
We don't know whether Van Gogh's idea of this triptych was ever fully realised.
He continued to paint sunflowers. He painted five versions of La Berceuse.
Perhaps to be able to realise some of these triptychs.
We do know, however, that in 1896 the Philadelphia painting of the Sunflowers...
was acquired by a French artist and collector...
by the name of Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld.
Rochefoucauld also owned a copy of La Berceuse...
a painting that today is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
We're not sure how Rochefoucauld installed them in his Paris apartment.
We'd like to think that perhaps they were close to one another.
But in any event, Rochefoucauld enjoyed the Philadelphia Sunflowers for 30 years.
In 1928, he sold them to a French dealer...
who in turn sold it to a Philadelphia collector...
a man who was also an artist, by the name of Caroll Tyson.
And when Tyson acquires the Sunflowers...
he also has a great collection of still lifes by Cézanne, by Renoir and by Manet.
At the time that Tyson acquires the painting in 1928...
the versions in Munich and in London were both part of those galleries...
and there were only two others in private hands.
The version in Amsterdam, which still belonged to the Van Gogh family...
and the version that is today in Tokyo, but in the 1920s was in Berlin.
And it's at this stage in our Facebook Live Event...
I'm going to hand the baton off to our colleagues in Tokyo...
at the Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum. Thank you for joining us in Philadelphia.
We hope that you'll stay with us for the remainder of the Live Event. Thank you.