Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers, 1888 by Vincent van Gogh
Canvas Print - 1260-VVG

Fifteen sunflowers crowd a plain earthenware jug, and yet the painting insists there are fourteen. Vincent van Gogh miscounted, or perhaps the small bud tucked at the lower left didn't quite qualify in his mind. Either way, the discrepancy is one of those small human snags that makes the picture feel painted rather than manufactured.

Look at how the flowers occupy every stage of a sunflower's short life. Some are still tight and greenish, others blazing open with petals like flames, and several have already shed their gold and become bristling seed-heads, gone to a russet exhaustion. Gogh follows the direction of each petal with a long, decisive stroke, then switches technique entirely for the centres, jabbing thick dabs of pigment that stand up from the canvas like actual seeds. Run your eye over the seed heads and you can almost feel their prickle under a fingertip.

The whole thing is yellow. Yellow behind, yellow beneath, yellow in the vase, yellow in the flowers – but the word barely covers what happens here. Pale sulphur washes the background wall. Orange ochre burns at the flower centres. The tabletop shifts toward a deeper mustard, and a thin line of turquoise slips along its edge, the only cool note in the whole composition and all the more shocking for it. Gogh limits himself and gains everything.

He was painting fast, before the blooms collapsed, in the heat of an Arles August. Four canvases in a week. He wrote to his brother Theo about working with the appetite of a Marseillais tucking into bouillabaisse, and you can taste that hunger in the surface – impasto piled thick, the new commercial oil paints of the nineteenth century holding their shape as he laid them down. This particular version, one of two he considered good enough to sign simply "Vincent" on the belly of the pot, was hung in the guest room of the Yellow House for Paul Gauguin's arrival that October. A welcome, a boast, a bouquet.

Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers belongs to a lineage of Dutch flower painting stretching back to the seventeenth-century vanitas – blooms as reminders of mortality – but there is nothing morbid here. The dying flowers look as alive as the fresh ones. Compare the tulip pictures of Bosschaert or de Heem, so precise and refrigerated, and Gogh's sunflowers feel positively rowdy by contrast, closer to organisms than to specimens.

What lingers, standing before it at the National Gallery in London, is warmth – not sentimental warmth but the actual radiant kind, as though the seed-heads had absorbed a Provençal afternoon and were slowly releasing it back into the room. Gratitude, Vincent van Gogh once suggested, was what these paintings meant. It is not a bad word for what one feels looking back.