A VAN GOGH SUNFLOWER UP FOR SALE

“It’s a pretty exciting event,” said James Roundell, director of Christie’s Impressionist Art department in London, as he confirmed Friday that the largest and most reproduced of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflower paintings is expected to fetch a record price at auction March 30.

Roundell, in a long-distance interview, predicted that the painting, one of seven in a series of Sunflower studies that Van Gogh painted the year before his suicide, “is going to make more than the Edouard Manet--’La Rue Mosniers aux Paveurs’--which we sold last December for $11 million.” That one, he suggested, was “a wonderful picture, but perhaps not something you identify the artist with.”

Discussing the Van Gogh, sold from a private estate and on loan to Britain’s National Gallery since 1959, Roundell’s voice brightened:

“When you think of Van Gogh, you think of sunflowers, and you think of sunflowers, you think of Van Gogh. It was an image we all grew up with. It was on my classroom walls.”

The painting is the largest of the series, measuring 39 1/2-by-30 1/2 inches, Roundell said. “It has a wonderful depth of paint-- impasto. All the individual brush strokes can be seen and they stand out. They appear to have a three-dimensional surface, almost as if the flowers themselves had been flattened onto the canvas. It’s a symphony of color, of yellows and oranges. . . . “

The painting is being sold from the private collection of the late mining engineer Chester Beatty and his late wife, Edith, who amassed one of Britain’s most celebrated private collections. A Christie’s spokesman said the couple bought the painting in Paris in 1934, but how much they paid for it is not known.

Of Van Gogh’s remaining Sunflowers works, one was destroyed in a Yokohama museum during World War II, presumably during a bombing, one is in a private collection, and the others are scattered, in museums in London, Munich, Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

Van Gogh painted the Sunflower series at Arles in Southern France between 1888 and 1889. The Christie’s Van Gogh was painted in January, 1889.

Roundell quoted from a letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo regarding the worth of his Sunflowers:

“For instance, if our Monticelli bunch of flowers is worth 500 francs to a collector, and it is, then I dare swear to you that my Sunflowers are worth 500 francs too, to one of these Scots or Americans.”

The record for a Van Gogh is $9.9 million, paid for a landscape sold at Sotheby’s in New York in April, 1985.

“Van Gogh did his Sunflower pictures at a critical moment in his life, a time of intense optimism, and the yellow paint symbolizes hope, light and warmth,” Roundell told the Associated Press. “He was hoping to create a ‘Studio of the South,’ including his friend Paul Gauguin, which would push forward the development of Post-Impressionist art.”

In February, 1890, Van Gogh told his sister and a critic that he was simplifying his technique with the Sunflower paintings and said: “I would like to paint in such a way that everybody, at least if they had eyes, would see it.”

Five months later, he shot himself to death. The artist had been released from a mental institution and was under a doctor’s care.