When, in July, Gauguin had written a letter encouraging Vincent to expect him, Vincent had spent one frenzied week in August painting the Sunflowers series for which he is so famous. Six Sunflowers, Fourteen Sunflowers, Fifteen Sunflowers. All achieved between 21 and 26 August. All for Gauguin. All composed of complementary colours. To hang in Gauguin’s room like a huge welcoming bouquet, as he wrote to Theo.
On one level, the Sunflowers are composite portraits of both men. They stand for Gauguin because they were the symbol of the Inca sun god of Peru and, following the return of the Spanish conquistadores in 1532, they had become the symbol of Peru in European iconography. But they were also a metaphorical self-portrait of Vincent himself. In Christian iconography, they hold a double significance, standing both for Christ as the light of the world, and for the questing soul that turns to the light to seek out the divine, just as the sunflower turns its head throughout the day to follow the sun on its journey through the heavens. This fused the meaning of sunflowers into a unified soul-portrait of both men.
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