Van Gogh painted this in one of the happiest moments of his life, for a friend he couldn’t wait to welcome home, and he had no idea what was coming... In the summer of 1888 Vincent was living alone in a small yellow house in Arles, in the south of France, and he had a dream: to turn it into a home for artists, a place where painters could live and work together. The first to come would be his friend Paul Gauguin, and Vincent wanted the room waiting for him to be beautiful. So he decided to fill it with flowers. As he wrote to his brother Theo: “Nothing but large sunflowers.” He painted as fast as he could, racing against the summer, because sunflowers wilt within days. By the end of August he had finished four canvases, bright yellow blooms in a simple vase, some fresh and open, some already drooping and going to seed. Gauguin finally arrived in October, saw them on the walls, and loved them. But that happiness didn’t last: two strong, difficult men under one roof began to clash, and just before Christmas, after a bitter argument, Vincent suffered the breakdown in which he cut off part of his ear. Gauguin left Arles and never came back. The dream of the yellow house was over after just nine weeks... Despite everything, Vincent never stopped loving those flowers, and in the weeks after his breakdown, he painted the sunflowers again, copying his own pictures, as if he were trying to hold on to that summer when everything still seemed possible. Some painters, he told Theo, were known for their peonies or their hollyhocks, “but I have the sunflower, in a way.” And he described what they meant to him in a few simple words: they were his way of “symbolizing gratitude.”