DESPITE ITS INCREASINGLY tarnished reputation in Europe, and its gradual banishment from the garden, the sunflower made a miraculous recovery in painting and the decorative arts, although precisely why it became so fashionable many have found hard to explain. Oscar Wilde, as we have seen, paraded both the lily and the sunflower on his highly successful lecture tour of America in 1882, praising the latter’s ‘gaudy leonine beauty’ and claiming the two flowers as the ‘most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art’. The audience at his Boston lecture included sixty Harvard students sporting lilies in their buttonholes and sunflowers in their hands. But credit for launching the sunflower craze must surely go to the earlier generation of artist-craftsmen, among them William Morris, who incorporated sunflowers into his wallpapers and declared the single sunflower to be ‘both interesting and beautiful, with its sharply chiselled yellow florets relieved by the quaintly patterned sad-coloured centre clogged with honey and beset with bees and butterflies’. (For Morris’s generation the term ‘sad’ was not necessarily a complaint, rather the opposite: the rage was for dull greens and amber yellows, although William Morris railed against a ‘dingy bilious yellow-green’ he was supposed to have brought into vogue.)
As far back as 1856 – when Oscar Wilde was less than two years old – Morris had featured sunflowers in his earliest published description of a garden, ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’, in which a long-dead medieval stonemason evokes the church he had built more than six hundred years previously, its cloister enclosing a lawn with a marble fountain carved with flowers and strange beasts, ‘and at the edge of the lawn, near the round edges, were a great many sunflowers that were all in blossom that autumn day; and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept passion-flowers and roses’.
In its dreamy medievalism, its nostalgia for a golden past that never was, its wild and garden flowers, its monks and castle, and its beautiful young woman with dark brown hair and eyes that were deep, calm and violet, Morris’s story could stand as a blueprint for the fads and fantasies of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – and fantasies they certainly were in this case, since sunflowers, and passion flowers, too, were unknown in thirteenth-century Europe. Morris would recognize this himself when he praised the sunflower as a ‘late comer to our gardens’ to an audience of guild workers and Birmingham artists. But other sunflower aficionados had an equally shaky grasp of historical plant introductions, among them Morris’s friend the English painter Edward Burne-Jones. In Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1861), inspired by Robert Browning’s poem of the same name, Burne-Jones implanted a riot of sunflowers in Browning’s terrifyingly barren landscape, thereby providing one of the earliest examples of the sunflower motif that would enthuse later decades.
After Morris and Burne-Jones, sunflowers proliferated across the art of Europe and America: sunflowers in a godly context (James Tissot, Jesus Looking Through a Lattice with Sunflowers, c.1886–94); in cool, Danish-style interiors (Michael Ancher, Girl with Sunflowers, 1889); in dazzling impressionistic sunlight (Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1881); in the hands of a ragged black Afro-American schoolchild (Winslow Homer, Taking Sunflower to Teacher, 1875); and in opulent drawing rooms furnished with oriental flair (Kate Hayllar, Sunflowers and Hollyhocks, 1889).
But it was in the decorative arts that the ubiquitous sunflower reigned supreme as one of the principal motifs of the Aesthetic Movement that began in the late 1860s, flourished through the 1870s and 1880s, then sank into a welter of parody and scorn shortly afterwards. You wore your sunflower on your sleeve or at least, if you were a fashionable woman, embroidered onto your velvet skirts. And you displayed it on every conceivable domestic object and surface: fabrics, wall paper, tiles, gilded pots, song sheets, jewellery, smoking caps, calling cards, sculptural busts (as in the writhing Clytie by George Frederic Watts), ornamental plates, carved furniture, teapots, fire tongs, clocks – any thing that might proclaim your aesthetic sensitivities. Such a ‘sunflower affectation’ filled Burne-Jones with disgust, according to his widow, and he vehemently denounced the ‘feeble folly’ of those ‘sunflower-worshippers’ to whom he had once stood as an un witting godfather.
Some of these household subjects were intended to poke fun at the worst excesses of the craze. An enduring classic is a hermaphrodite teapot of 1882 from the Worcester Royal Porcelain Works. The male side displays a foppish young man wearing a ‘greenery-yallery’ jacket complete with sunflower buttonhole, while the figure on the reverse has metamorphosed into a lovelorn maiden dressed in a summer smock pinned with a calla lily, their mutual arms and limp wrists providing the teapot’s spout and handle. An inscription on the base drives home the teapot’s solemn warning of the ‘Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and evolution of living up to one’s teapot’ – a sly dig at both Darwinism and the influential Grosvenor Gallery’s display of a single teapot with the exhortation to ‘live up to it’. The ebonized wood and porcelain sunflower clocks designed by Lewis F. Day for the London firm of Howell, James & Co. were, by contrast, produced without any hint of irony.
The aesthetic sunflower spilled over into architecture, added as a stock feature to the fashionable red-brick houses erected around Chelsea and Kensington, in London’s ‘little colony’ of Bedford Park, and to the mansion flats built in mock Queen Anne style. Lower down the social scale, even Board Schools and drab tenements were sometimes brightened with a solitary sunflower, added almost as an afterthought, ‘a modest conciliatory gesture to Art and Queen Anne’.
After such a surfeit of sunflowers, a counter-reaction was inevitable; much of the scorn was directed at poor Oscar Wilde, whose ceaseless proselytizing had pushed his favourite flowers to the fore. ‘When he wore a daisy in his buttonhole, thousands of young men did likewise,’ wrote the actress and royal mistress Lillie Langtry in her memoirs. ‘When he proclaimed the sunflower “adorable”, it was to be found adorning every drawing room.’ The image would return to haunt him. A Punch cartoon of 1881 has Wilde’s head stuck inside the sunflower’s leonine mane that he would soon praise to his American lecture audience. The artist was Edward Linley Sambourne, and an editorial note explained that this particular ‘Fancy Portrait’ was of ‘O.W.’:
Aesthete of Aesthetes!
What’s in a name?
The poet is WILDE,
But his poetry’s tame.
11. Cartoon by Edward Linley Sambourne for Punch, 25 June 1881, depicting the Irish writer and aesthete Oscar Wilde as a sunflower.
That same year Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience opened in London and New York, lampooning Wilde’s aestheticism and the pretensions of artistic celebrities such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Sunflowers adorned the opera’s programme cover for London’s Savoy Theatre, as they doubtless adorned many of the skirts and bodices of its female audience. Still playing after 500 performances, the opera struck a chord with the architectural press, wearied by aestheticism’s ‘inflated nothings’. The sunflower craze was symptomatic of a deeper malaise, declared the theatre critic of The British Architect: ‘If there were nothing else to illustrate the fact, the sickening repetition of the sunflower in all sorts of decorative work (as though it were the sum total of beauty) would be enough to show how little good the general public have yet derived from the increased study of art.’
WHILE THE AESTHETIC Movement was fast losing momentum, sunflowers in art experienced their apotheosis in the glorious sun-drenched canvases painted by Vincent van Gogh in Arles as he waited feverishly for Paul Gauguin to join him in his ‘Studio of the South’, an idea that had fired his artistic vision but which lasted as a physical reality for less than a year.
Van Gogh had painted sunflowers before he travelled south: a fairly standard Bowl with Sunflowers, Roses and Other Flowers (1886) and a quartet of still lifes with great flower heads gone to seed (1887), which owed their inspiration to the sunflowers he had seen growing
in the cottage gardens around Montmartre. These last paintings explored the effects of different brushstrokes and background colours, from the blue-and-yellow and darker reds of his Two Cut Sunflowers, to the highly textured surface of Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down, in which the fringed petals flicker like flames, and the whole canvas flares with life in defiance of the chopped-off stems.
More sunflowers greeted his arrival in Arles; the splashes of colour in these Provençal gardens took on for him an amazing brilliance, ‘and in the limpid air there’s something happier and more suggestive of love than in the north’. Soon the sunflower with its vibrant yellows and solar symbolism came to represent all his hopes for a new beginning in both his creative and his everyday life; he told his ever-generous brother Theo that he was painting some big sunflowers ‘with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse’.
Van Gogh’s letters to Theo, and to his painter friend Émile Bernard, reveal how sunflowers came to dominate his artistic vision and his psychic health. After telling Bernard about his attempts to paint dusty thistles swarming with butterflies, he wrote of the half-dozen sunflower pictures with which he hoped to decorate his studio, ‘a decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various BLUE backgrounds – from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin laths painted in orange lead’ – an effect he likened to the stained-glass windows of a Gothic church. Bernard was then staying with Gauguin in the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany and although van Gogh wished to be with them, he drew comfort from re-imagining his sunflowers.
Van Gogh continued to work like a demon as he waited fretfully for Gauguin to join him. The plan was that Theo would fund Gauguin’s stay, receiving paintings in return. But Gauguin still had to find money for the journey, which he constantly delayed. Vincent, meanwhile, was painting three sunflower canvases simultaneously, one with three huge flowers in a green vase; another with three flowers – one just a bud, another gone to seed – against a royal-blue background; and a third of twelve flowers and buds in a yellow vase, light on light, which he hoped would be the best. (None of these paintings turned out quite as he described.) ‘In the hope of living in a studio of our own with Gauguin,’ he wrote excitedly to Theo, ‘I’d like to do a decoration for the studio. Nothing but large Sunflowers. Next door to your shop, in the restaurant [the inexpensive Bouillon Duval on the Boulevard Montmartre], as you know, there’s such a beautiful decoration of flowers there; I always remember the big sunflower in the window.’
In van Gogh’s fevered mind, the sunflower sequence had expanded to a dozen or so panels, ‘a symphony in blue and yellow’, on which he worked from sunrise to sunset, ‘because the flowers wilt quickly, and it’s a matter of doing the whole thing in one go’. By the time of his next letter to Theo, he had started on his fourth sunflower canvas – fourteen flowers, he said (in fact, fifteen), against a greenish-yellow background – and he continued to push his technique towards greater simplicity. Inspired by a Manet painting of huge pink peonies against a light background, he aimed to banish the fussy stippling of the pointillists, devising distinctive brushstrokes for each element in his painting. But the paintings were about more than art and style; they gave physical form to the new life he was about to begin. The room he promised Theo in a year’s time (‘or Gauguin, if he comes’) would have white walls with a decoration of great yellow sunflowers, ‘12 or 14 to the bunch, crammed into this tiny boudoir with its pretty bed and everything else dainty. It will not be commonplace.’
Paul Gauguin arrived in Arles in late October 1888 and stayed for just nine weeks. During this time, the men lived and worked together, dissecting art and life in their conversations and in their pictures. For both artists their time at Arles was pivotal: for van Gogh, it represented a culmination of all his hopes, but for Gauguin it was a ‘point of departure, instrumental in helping him chart his future course’. Gauguin was particularly impressed by van Gogh’s sunflowers, declaring that he liked them better than the ones Monet had painted in a large Japanese vase; and he painted van Gogh painting his sunflowers in a portrait he called The Painter of Sunflowers. Against a background of Provençal blues, yellows and greens, the tormented Dutchman stares intently at a vase of imaginary sunflower heads, the time for their flowering having long since passed, as he labours to transfer his vision on to canvas.
By 23 December 1888, the dream of artistic collaboration was over. Gauguin left Arles after van Gogh had reportedly threatened him with a knife, then turned it on himself, severing part of his ear in a local brothel where he had taken refuge. He never saw Gauguin again, and after a short spell in hospital he returned to the Yellow House in Arles, painting three more vases of sunflowers copied from his efforts of the previous August, ostensibly to meet Gauguin’s request for one of the Arles sunflower paintings to add to the two Parisian sunflowers van Gogh had already given him. Van Gogh categorically refused his request for an original but was happy to attempt a copy. Was he also trying to replicate – in midwinter – the joyful frenzy of their creation the previous summer? Sunflowers held such a special meaning for him, and these were the last ones he painted. Some three months before he died, he wrote to his youngest sister Willemien, seeking forgiveness that his paintings were ‘almost a cry of anguish while symbolizing gratitude in the rustic sunflower’.
The sunflower stayed with Gauguin, too, recurring almost as a sign of bad conscience over the way he had treated his friend. Gauguin’s Caribbean Woman, or Female Nude with Sunflowers conflated van Gogh’s flowers with a négresse figure of his own. Yet other paintings of his were more one-sided borrowings, including a number of still lifes undertaken in 1899, apparently at the request of the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard, and again in 1901, with Sunflowers on an Armchair, Sunflowers and Mangoes, and Sunflowers with Puvis de Chavannes’ ‘Hope’. Hope and sunflowers went together for Gauguin, as they had for his former friend, but hope in the end disappointed them both.
Flowers were a different matter, however. Writing to his mother from the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in October 1889, van Gogh compared the art market to ‘a sort of tulip mania from which the living painters get more disadvantage than advantage. And it will also pass like tulip mania.’ Although the fever abates, the flower growers remain: ‘And so I regard painting in the same way, that what remains is a sort of flower growing. And as to that I reckon myself fortunate to be in it.’
VAN GOGH WAS, of course, entirely correct in his castigation of the art market. Unsold in his lifetime, as were all but one of his paintings, aside from those ‘bought’ by brother Theo, his vase of fifteen sunflowers sold at auction to a Japanese buyer in 1987 for nearly $40 million, making it then the most expensive artwork in the world. (The record was broken a few months later by another van Gogh painting, of irises.) From New-World wonder to art-market phenomenon, the sunflower had travelled a long way, without losing its propensity to shock and delight in equal measure.
Its twentieth-century history is nonetheless a steadier affair, substituting economic for artistic importance as the cultivated sunflower transformed itself yet again into one of the world’s four most important edible oil crops, especially important in the Soviet bloc states of central and eastern Europe. The story echoes the sunflower’s beginnings in prehistoric America, when chance as much as design influenced its evolution. Reputedly introduced to Russia by Peter the Great, sunflowers are said to owe their popularity there to a decree from the Russian Orthodox Church prohibiting the consumption of certain oil-rich foods in the fasting days of Lent. Sunflower seeds, which contain a high proportion of oil, were then so little known in Russia that they were not listed and so could be eaten with a good conscience.
Cultivation increased rapidly, spreading to the Ukraine, where the acres of golden sunflowers explain how the flower became the nation’s unofficial symbol; by the beginning of the twentieth century the sunflower was one of Russia’s major crops. The Russian sunflower travelled back to North America
with Mennonite and Jewish immigrants, and a variety known as ‘Mammoth Russian’ appeared in American seed catalogues from the 1880s. Breeding began in earnest, for pest and disease resistance, early ripening and higher oil content, lifting the latter from below 30 to above 50 per cent, and making sunflower seed the third largest source of vegetable oil worldwide, after soybean and palm. Even now, Russia and the Ukraine lead the global field in sunflower production.
Back in America, the humble sunflower demonstrated its continued ability to create its own mythology when Kansas adopted the plant as its state flower and floral emblem in 1903, in a statute that spun a mythic past of frontier life, celebrating the sunflower as the glory of the past, the pride of the present and richly emblematic of a golden future. The Kansas state legislature declared this native wild flower to be
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