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The great tradition of flower painting in western art seems to have ended more than a century ago, in a series of tremendous bangs amid an obbligato of whimpers. Bang number one has to be the explosion of Van Gogh, 11 paintings in all, probably. The first four, studies of drying sunflower heads, were painted in Paris in 1887. Of the seven he painted in Arles a year later, the first were intended as decorative panels for the house he shared with Gauguin. He wrote to Theo Van Gogh: "If I carry out the plan there will be a dozen panels ... a symphony in blue and yellow." The decorative purpose of the panels explains their shallowness of field, simplicity of composition and brushwork. He tried to paint each one in a single day, before the processes of decay overtook the flower forms, but they withered even as he gazed on them. Like all great still life, Van Gogh's sunflowers are images of the transitoriness of beauty, as shifting as sunlight itself.
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