Intimate letters, record-breaking sales and the world of competitive gardening paint a fascinating picture of the story behind Vincent’s floral masterpieces
Not surprisingly, Vincent van Gogh has proved a rich seam for the Exhibition on Screen gallery series, with one of the most commercially potent of modern painters providing material for previous films including Van Gogh in
Japan and Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing. Here, the attention is even more micro, though hardly niche: the series of sunflower studies Van Gogh painted in 1888 and 1889, one of which went on to command a record auction price in the mid 1980s and practically on its own send the art market into the financial stratosphere.
Super-familiar though the sunflower paintings may be, this film does a pretty good
Job of drilling down through the intricacies of the series, from Van Gogh’s earlier “Paris” set, and then the seven pictures he painted in Arles, which provide varying versions of the famous flower-vase arrangement. The film takes us carefully through each of the pictures, showing them in situ and giving the curators the chance to chat, rather like the epic Leonardo tour the same producers released in 2019. This film, though, has the chance to dwell a little longer, sketching in biographical information and offering readings from Van Gogh’s own letters to fill out the artist’s thinking. There’s also an interesting insight into the “competitive gardening” of the era, and the sunflower’s place in it: Oxford University’s Stephen Harris offers a more enthusiastic explainer than you normally get in films like this.