Printable sheet
Van Gogh sunflowers in a vase signed Vincent, with blooms that are open, drooping and still in bud. An art printable for kids; download the free PDF.
Printable sheet
Free for personal and educational use
Download PDFPrintA vase with the name Vincent written on it, packed with open sunflowers, wilting ones and buds, sitting on a table.
Use lots of yellows and oranges and a pale yellow background like Van Gogh.
Count the sunflowers and sort them into open, wilting and buds.
One version of Sunflowers belongs to a museum in Tokyo.
Van Gogh sunflowers rank alongside The Starry Night as his most popular paintings. Vincent van Gogh painted them in Arles, in southern France, during the summer of 1888, while he lived in a house he called the Yellow House.
He dreamed of starting an artists' community there and was waiting for his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, to arrive. To brighten up the guest room, he painted several vases of sunflowers in just a few days, racing against time because the flowers wilted so fast. Gauguin admired them so much that Van Gogh later painted more versions.
The paintings show sunflowers at every stage of life: tight buds, blooms in full glory and dried flowers dropping their petals. In a way, each vase tells the whole life story of a flower. For Van Gogh, yellow stood for sunlight and happiness, and he used it in dozens of different shades.
Today the various versions are spread across museums in London, Amsterdam, Munich, Philadelphia and elsewhere. On the vase he wrote simply Vincent, the way he signed most of his paintings, because he felt people outside the Netherlands found his last name hard to pronounce.
