Van Gogh’s yellow-ground Sunflowers from the National Gallery in London has been placed beside the blue-turquoise version owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow. On view in Philadelphia from 6 June to 11 October 2026, the encounter is exceptional because the 1888 London canvas has crossed the Atlantic for the first time.
The works are nearly the same size, yet the five months between them and their different colour structures reveal how Van Gogh reconsidered one idea.nnIn August 1888, Van Gogh painted four large sunflower pictures in a single week at the Yellow House in Arles, intending them to decorate rooms prepared for Paul Gauguin. In the London version, flower heads, tabletop and background are bound together by closely related warm yellows.
Thick paint brings fully opened, fading and seed-heavy blooms into one vase, turning the still life into an intense meditation on different stages of time.nnAfter Gauguin admired the pictures, Van Gogh returned to the subject in January 1889 and made repetitions of earlier compositions. The blue-turquoise ground of the Philadelphia version makes the yellow flowers register more sharply.
Displayed together, the canvases allow viewers to compare brush direction, impasto, vase colour and subtle changes in the position of each head. The exhibition’s subtitle, a ‘symphony in blue and yellow’, stresses that colour operates as an emotional and structural force rather than simple description.nnThe five major Sunflowers canvases are now held in London, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Munich and Tokyo.
All five have gathered in the United States only twice, in Philadelphia in 1954 and Chicago in 2001. This exhibition reunites only two directly related works, but the London painting’s first transatlantic journey makes it singular. Their pairing clarifies the difference between copying and creative repetition, showing how Van Gogh turned the same motif into a new colour proposition each time.
