Van Gogh painted the sunflowers to decorate a bedroom. He had taken four rooms in a yellow house in Arles, Paul Gauguin had agreed to come and live in one of them, and he wanted the walls to say welcome before the man arrived.
Four canvases in a week
It was August 1888. He painted the first four in a single week, starting at sunrise every morning, because cut sunflowers wilt and each canvas had to be got down in one go before the flowers closed. The speed is in the paint: the petals are single loaded strokes, put down once and left alone.
What he did with the colour is the part no other painter had risked. He set the flowers against a yellow ground — yellow on yellow, with no contrasting colour anywhere to hold the shapes apart — and made it work by varying the yellows instead, ochre against chrome against lemon, so the picture separates by temperature rather than by contrast. He wrote that sunflowers stood for gratitude. He hung the first two of them in the room he was keeping for Gauguin.
Gauguin came in October
Gauguin arrived on 23 October 1888. For nine weeks the two of them lived in the yellow house, ran a joint housekeeping fund, painted the same subjects side by side and argued about every part of it. Gauguin liked the sunflowers — he said they were completely Vincent, which was praise — and in December he painted a portrait of van Gogh in the act of painting them.
On 23 December it broke. Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear that night, Gauguin went to Paris within days, and the two of them never shared a house again. The flowers on the wall of the spare room had been painted in October, in hope, by a man who did not know any of that was coming.
Then he painted them again
He came out of hospital in Arles in January 1889 and went straight back to the sunflowers, making repetitions of the two best of the first four. Five large canvases of sunflowers in a vase exist. The one in Amsterdam is that January version, painted a few weeks after the man they had been for had gone, by somebody who had every reason to paint something else.
In 1890 Gauguin wrote asking for one of the sunflower paintings as a gift. Van Gogh, who gave pictures away all his life, did not want to part with those, and said so. He was dead within the year, and the flowers he had painted to make a spare room welcoming became the thing his name is attached to.
The friendship did not last until Christmas. The flowers are still here, yellow on yellow, still saying welcome.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.