Ridinghouse,2021

outlines onto multilayered veils of coloured space and surface. The circle was seen by Hoyland as a fundamental form of nature bearing within it migratory allusions to the sun, moon, face, target, eye or flower.18 In Venus of Arles (fig.37) the circle assumes an almost carnal flower form, with a blue core rimmed in turn by black, yellow, crimson and burgundy reds placed at the centre of a silvery pink veil upon a black ground. Letter to Vincent (p.99) features a wounded yellow sun weeping bloody rivulets of paint high above a circle formed of multicoloured rings sinking downwards into black space washed with pink. Three slender bars of green and blue block the flux of colour from flooding into the viewer’s space.

In For Vincent (fig.35 and p.125), the last of Hoyland’s homages, the sunflower symbol and the starry night merge into one, as an enlarged sun/sunflower/head form in bright lemony yellow bursts forward through a blue explosion on a black night-sky ground, its circle container leaking fluid and fragments of crimson, white and green paint matter.

Friendship

In summer 1887 Van Gogh painted two canvases, each displaying a pair of sunflower heads close-up: yellow and orange on blue in one; massed strokes of orange, yellow and brown in the other (fig.36). The two paintings were given to Gauguin on Theo’s suggestion, with Vincent receiving one of Gauguin’s Martinique canvases in exchange.19 Van Gogh intended his sunflower paintings to function as pictorial metaphors binding ideals of companionship and recompense to the stylisation of natural form and ‘certain qualities of colour’.20 In a long letter to Aurier, dated 10 February 1890, he explained that the two paintings of Sunflowers in a Vase currently being exhibited ‘express an idea symbolising gratitude’.21 The bouquet takes form simultaneously as a material manifestation in paint of the idea (that is, ‘gratitude’) and of the living petal flesh of the flower.

Van Gogh and Gauguin worked alongside each other during their nine-week cohabitation at the Yellow House in Arles from 23 October to 23 December 1888. It was a tumultuous and difficult experience for both artists, as what they (especially Van Gogh) had hoped would be a communal utopia disintegrated into a combative testing of creative principles and the assertion of divergent artistic paths. Nonetheless, the ideals of fellowship and shared artistic aims that underpinned the Yellow House sojourn remained untarnished. Van Gogh’s letter to Aurier encouraged the critic to look at his study of Gauguin’s room at the Yellow House, with its vacated armchair painted ‘entirely in broken tones of green and red’. With each thick brushstroke the complementary hues served as a reminder of Gauguin’s contribution to the renovation of art through the radiant deployment of colour. Van Gogh adds that he will put a study of cypress trees ‘in the corner of a wheatfield on a summer’s day when the mistral is blowing’ in his next consignment for Aurier as a ‘memento of your article’.22