No other artists in the history of art have been so closely identified with each other as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. Their often volatile relationship has been dramatized in numerous books and movies, focusing particularly on their nine-week stay together in Arles in southern France during the final months of 1888. An experience that began positively, signaling the start of an artistic colony, the Studio of the South, but ended in tragedy in an incident universally known, whatever your background in art. For just a few days before Christmas, Van Gogh cut off his ear (actually his ear lobe) and started his long descent into mental illness.
We know the details from Gauguin, because he was there. According to his account, he was the original target of Van Gogh's frenzy, caused by the latter's realization that his friend Paul was leaving him. However, Van Gogh turned his anger upon himself. "Vincent had returned home after my departure," Gauguin related shortly afterward, "and cut his ear clean through. Then he put a big beret over his head and went to a brothel to take the ear to a wretched girl...."
Gauguin and Van Gogh never did see each other again. Vincent would commit suicide over a year and a half later, leaving to posterity some two thousand works of art.
Yet, there is a sequel to this story. Because Gauguin and Van Gogh continued their friendship at a distance, exchanging letters up to Vincent's death. Their mutual love and passion for art bonding the two, even during Vincent's sojourn in a mental institution, where he was allowed to keep painting, creating such masterpieces as Starry Night, often considered a symbol of our times.
A different subject, though, connected Gauguin to Van Gogh: the sunflowers, another icon of Vincent's vision of life. For Vincent painted them expressively for his friend Gauguin, back in August, 1888, in anticipation of Paul moving into the house that the two would share in Arles. "Now that I hope to live with Gauguin in a studio of our own, I want to make a decoration for our studio," Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "Nothing but big sunflowers."
Soon after, Vincent decided to decorate Gauguin's bedroom instead with the paintings of the sunflowers. And the beauty of that room haunted Gauguin during the thirteen years that he survived Vincent. Paul would write of the unforgettable sunflowers with purple eyes that shone golden in the sunlight passing through the curtains of his bedroom. "They bathe their stems in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In the corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent," Gauguin would remember long after, as if he could still see Van Gogh's extraordinary creations before him.
Even when Gauguin moved to the exotic world of Tahiti where he lived for most of the last decade of his life, he could not escape the memory of Vincent and the sunflowers. Sick, alone, and far from his native country of France, Gauguin probably spent his days dwelling on the past, especially his time with Vincent. For in October, 1898, close to ten years after first viewing the sunflower paintings that had filled the walls of his bedroom in Arles, Gauguin wrote to a friend asking him to send some sunflower seeds.
So in the midst of the tropical flowers of Tahiti, Gauguin tended his garden of imported sunflowers until 1901, when was he was ready to recreate them with his brush. Not one, but four canvases would result, as if Gauguin could not stop until he had fulfilled his own vision of the sunflowers. Two of them, both titled, Still Life with Sunflowers on an Armchair, are darker, more naturalistic in appearance, while Still Life with Sunflowers and Mangoes blooms with the dream-like colors of Gauguin's imagination. Sunflowers with Puvis de Chavannes's Hope overflows its wooden Tahitian vessel with the bounty of fertility and growth.
Soon after their completion, Gauguin would leave Tahiti for the Marquesas Islands, a remote island chain located 750 miles away. He would die a few years later, in 1903, ultimately becoming like his friend Vincent, one of the legends of art.