Exclusive: Philadelphia Art Museum to host sensational Van Gogh exhibition featuring two ‘Sunflowers’ – The Art Newspaper

Though not but publicly introduced, The Artwork Newspaper can reveal that the Philadelphia Artwork Museum will subsequent 12 months maintain an exhibition entitled Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow (6 June-11 October 2026). In line with a museum spokesperson, the present “will carry collectively two Sunflower work, contemplating how the artist used color and brushwork to completely different expressive results”.

The Philadelphia museum has its personal Sunflowers (January 1889), one with a turquoise background. The curator’s coup, nonetheless, is to safe the mortgage of the best of the Arles Sunflowers, the unique model with a yellow background (August 1888), which is at London’s Nationwide Gallery. Since its acquisition in 1924, the London portray has solely gone on mortgage overseas 4 instances, however will now make its option to the US subsequent 12 months.

The Philadelphia Sunflowers was beforehand lent to the Nationwide Gallery’s personal blockbuster exhibition, Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers (14 September 2024-19 January 2025), marking the primary time that the Philadelphia museum had lent the image since its acquisition in 1963. London’s reciprocal mortgage to Philadelphia is due to this fact a recognition of their current generosity.

On the London present, the 2 Sunflowers work had been hung in an association which Van Gogh himself had envisaged: in a “triptych” with La Berceuse (The Lullaby) (January 1889), a portrait of his good friend Augustine Roulin holding the twine of a rocking cradle. Vincent as soon as made a sketch of the triptych in a letter to his brother Theo, although it has disappeared. Nevertheless, a 1914 {photograph} of the drawing survives.

From the Yellow Home to Philadelphia

In August 1888, within the Yellow Home in Arles, Van Gogh painted 4 Sunflowers nonetheless lifes. To see how the Philadelphia and London variations match into Van Gogh’s work, a little bit of background is required.

Van Gogh initially made a Sunflowers with three blooms (now in a personal assortment) and one other with six blooms (destroyed in Japan in the course of the Second World Struggle). However the two well-known ones had 14 blooms on a turquoise-blue background (now on the Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and 15 blooms on a yellow background (Nationwide Gallery, London).

A number of months later Van Gogh made copies of essentially the most profitable pair: two copies with a yellow background (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Sompo Museum of Artwork, Tokyo) and one with a turquoise background (Philadelphia).

Vincent despatched Philadelphia’s turquoise Sunflowers to Theo in Paris in April 1889. This image had been supposed for Gauguin, though it stays unclear whether or not it really reached him.

What is for certain is that in 1895 the identical Sunflowers was purchased for the equal of $80 by Depend Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, an avant-garde patron. He saved it till 1928.

The Philadelphia collector and artist Carroll Tyson then bought the Sunflowers by means of the Paris vendor Paul Rosenberg. He paid the equal of $45,000. The image would now be value a number of hundred million {dollars}.

Tyson seems to have had an ambivalent angle in the direction of the acquisition. His son-in-law Louis Madeira recalled that Tyson fastidiously positioned the Sunflowers behind his eating chair, in order that he wouldn’t have to have a look at it throughout meals. Tyson was stated to really feel that the Van Gogh was “crude and untutored”. It might have appeared too fashionable for his barely extra conventional style—or presumably the anecdote was merely a household joke.

When Tyson died in 1956, the turquoise Sunflowers handed to his spouse Helen. On her dying in 1963 she bequeathed 22 of their work to the Philadelphia museum, together with the Van Gogh. It has lengthy been the preferred image within the gallery.

Framing a masterpiece

Simply earlier than Philadelphia’s Sunflowers was despatched to the London exhibition in 2024 it was reframed, in all probability for the primary time in a century. It could quickly be hanging in shut proximity to the Nationwide Gallery’s Sunflowers and curators on the two establishments realised that their incompatible frames could be jarring for guests. 

Philadelphia’s portray was in an ornate gilded body, whereas the London image had been put into a less complicated body in 1999. This plainer London body, made within the seventeenth century in Italy, appears to be like its age, with quite a few outdated woodworm holes.

Jennifer Thompson, the Philadelphia museum’s curator, due to this fact determined that it will be higher to make a body much like the Nationwide Gallery’s. This was completed, however there was a delicate change: the brand new body was intentionally not a precise copy of the London one, though at first look it appears to be like the identical.

When the Philadelphia Sunflowers was hung within the Nationwide Gallery exhibition in 2024-25, it was realised that the brand new body confirmed off the portray extra successfully—and it was due to this fact retained when the image was returned to America final January. Which means that when Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow opens on the Philadelphia Artwork Museum in June 2026, the 2 Sunflowers will look their finest.

Information of the exhibition comes, fairly coincidentally, in every week which has seen the ousting of the Philadelphia Artwork Museum’s director, Sacha Suda. This was reportedly linked to her failure to seek the advice of the museum’s trustees over a controversial identify change from the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork. The Sunflowers present, nonetheless, is within the museum’s exhibition schedule and shouldn’t be affected by her departure.

As for the title of the approaching present, it derives from a letter from Vincent to Theo of 21-22 August 1888. He wrote that he hoped his Sunflowers sequence could be “a symphony in blue and yellow”. Van Gogh beloved complementary colors, reminiscent of blue and yellow, which “sing” when subsequent to one another. Guests to the Philadelphia exhibition may have the very uncommon privilege of having fun with the impact.

Martin Bailey is a number one Van Gogh specialist and particular correspondent for The Artwork Newspaper. He has curated exhibitions on the Barbican Artwork Gallery, Compton Verney/Nationwide Gallery of Scotland and Tate Britain.

Martin has written a lot of bestselling books on Van Gogh’s years in France: The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln 2016, UK and US), Starry Night time: Van Gogh on the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, UK and US). The Sunflowers are Mine (2024, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale (2024, UK and US) are additionally now out there in a extra compact paperback format.

His different current books embrace Dwelling with Vincent van Gogh: The Houses & Landscapes that formed the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, UK and US), which gives an summary of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, UK and US). My Buddy Van Gogh/Emile Bernard gives the primary English translation of Bernard’s writings on Van Gogh (David Zwirner Books 2023, UKand US).

To contact Martin Bailey, please e mail vangogh@theartnewspaper.com

Please be aware that he doesn’t undertake authentications.

Discover all of Martin’s adventures with Van Gogh right here