Teeming with visual drama and emotion, Van Gogh’s richly-colored bouquet of wildflowers exemplifies the creative genius of the artist at the culmination of his career. Depicting a bounty of sensory splendor from the fields of Auvers, this important picture captures the artist at the height of his mania and only weeks before his tragic end. It was during this period that Van Gogh painted the most powerful pictures of his career, including his legendary Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet and Wheat Fields with Crows. An expressive masterwork, Nature morte, Vase aux marguerites et coquelicots transcends the boundaries of its genre and offers an insightful psychological profile.
The present composition was painted in mid-June 1890 in Auvers-sur Oise, the town where the artist settled following his release from the asylum at St-Rémy in May 1890. “Auvers is very beautiful, among other things a lot of old thatched roofs, which are getting rare…really it is profoundly beautiful, it is the real country, characteristic and picturesque” (Letter 635). Renting a small room at the Auberge Ravoux, he lacked a proper studio, which compelled him to go elsewhere to paint. He spent his days setting up his easel in the fields to paint the lush countryside, or visiting his physician, Dr. Paul Gachet. The artist described his new living situation with enthusiasm, especially the close kinship he felt with the “rather eccentric” art collector, Dr. Gachet, who offered him a quiet environment in which he could work. As he told Theo in one of his first letters after meeting the doctor in late May, Gachet’s house was filled with black antiques as well as Impressionist paintings including ” two fine flower pieces by Cézanne.” Van Gogh found Gachet’s environment so inviting that he pledged to “… gladly, very gladly, do a bit of brushwork here” (LT635). Over the coming weeks, Van Gogh would paint his celebrated portrait of Dr. Gachet, along with several views of his flower garden and members of his family.
The present work was painted at Gachet’s house and probably came into his possession upon completion. Van Gogh was inspired by the many objects that Gachet collected, including one particular Cézanne still-life that hung on Gachet’s wall. In that picture, the rounded edge of the table top and general arrangement can be likened to that of the present work. On June 4, he told Theo that despite the clutter of the Gachet’s accomodations, “there is always something for arranging flowers in or for a still life. I did these studies for him to show him that if it is not a case for which he is paid in money, we will still compensate him for what he does for us.”
The present work was one of the few works that Van Gogh sold or traded during his lifetime, and it was possibly given to Gachet in exchange for treatment. Looking at this picture, we can imagine the artist traipsing through the fields on his way to Gachet’s, gathering up armfuls of poppies, daisies, cornflowers and sheaves of wheat to squeeze into one of the modest vases in Gachet’s antique-filled house. Indeed, several days later, the artist began work on the present composition as well as another painting, featuring the same earthenware vase. Writing on June 16, he explained “At the moment I am working on two studies, one a bunch of wild plants, thistles, ears of wheat and sprays of different kinds of leaves — the one almost red, the other bright green, the third turning yellow” (letter no. 642).
While his description most certainly applies to Still life, Vase with Field Flowers and Thistle (F. 763), the catalogue raisonné identifies the present work as being painted contemporaneously on June 16-17. In comparison with the more reserved and academic still-lifes that he had completed in Paris in the mid-1880s, the present work evidences the dramatic shift in the artist’s painterly style, now characterized by frenetic energy. “I am working a good deal and quickly these days,” the artist wrote June 13,”in do doing, I seek to express the desperately swift passing away of things in modern life” (Letter W23).
As noted in a recent biography of the artist, Van Gogh was flooded by anxiety in Auvers, and his agitation surely spilled over onto even his most optimistic canvases: “It was a beautiful, alluring vision — as much as paint and works could make it. But real life for Vincent in Auvers was anything but idyllic. He had arrived in May holding on to the thinnest thread: terrified by the possiblity of another attack, still racked with guilt over the money diverted from Theo’s new family, haunted by the stacks of unsold paintings in Paris. He poured his despair into a letter so bleak that he didn’t dare to mail it: ‘I am far from having reached any kind of tranquility… I feel a failure … a lot that I accept and that I will not change …. The prospect grows darker, I see no happy future at all'” (Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh, The Life, New York, 2011, p. 838). It is under this black cloud of despair, using flowers from the same fields in which he would attempt to take his own life only weeks later, that the artist painted this extraordinary composition.
It is probable that Gachet either sold or faciliated the sale of this painting to Gaston Alexandre Camentron, the collector of Impressionist pictures, who eventually sold the picture to Paul Cassirer in 1911. The picture remained with a series of private collectors in Germay until the mid-1920s, when it made its way to London and eventually across the Atlantic, where it was one of the first pictures by the artist to be sold in the United States. In 1928, it was sold by the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1928 to A. Conger Goodyear. Known as one of the principal founders of the Museum of Modern Art, Goodyear kept this work in his family’s private collection. It was eventually gifted by the Goodyear family in part to the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, where it was on display to the public for over thirty years.
In November 2014, the painting was at Sotheby’s New York, Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale; had been valued at US$30 million to US$50 million before the sale; and was sold to a Chinese film mogul — Wang Zhongjun, for a record US$62 million, he admitted he would have paid even more for the masterpiece.
Wang Zhongjun is the chairman of the high-powered Huayi Brothers film studio. Speaking at a presentation at the auction house’s Hong Kong gallery, Wang said the price — a record for a still life painting by the artist — was “a bit lower” than he had been expecting to pay.
“I like it, it’s not a matter of price, it’s like I didn’t spend money, it hangs on the wall and it belongs to me,” Wang said. “Van Gogh is my favourite artist in terms of his use of colours and many other aspects,” he added. He hung the piece at his Hong Kong home.
Forbes Magazine put Wang’s net worth at nearly US$1 billion, the 268th richest person in China. Huayi Brothers Media is one of the largest private entertainment groups in China and has produced and distributed some of the country’s popular movies and television productions, according to its website.
In 2013, tycoon Wang Jianlin’s Wanda Group bought the 1950 Pablo Picasso painting Claude And Paloma for US$28 million, more than double the high estimate of US$12 million. At the time, the company came under fire for the extravagant purchase, with some Chinese Internet users questioning Wang’s patriotism and the painting’s value. Wang Zhongjun came under similar criticism in November 2014.
Chinese collectors have sent prices for their own country’s heritage spiralling on the back of its economic boom, and are now turning their attention to Western items too. The last great wave of Asian buying came as Japan reached the height of its economic power in the 1980s, culminating in 1990 when Japanese paper tycoon Ryoei Saito bought van Gogh’s Portrait Of Dr Gachet for US$82.5 million and Renoir’s Bal Du Moulin De La Galette for US$78.1 million.
Source: Sotheby’s; The Straits Times