Once Upon a Time, Vincent’s Sunflowers Could Be Sneezed At

Tapping my feet and my teeth with anxiety in early 1975, I stared at this relatively harmless-looking picture of about 15 bedraggled sunflowers stuck in a vase.

They were in a vahs , since we were in the waiting room of a plastic surgeon in Memphis, Tenn.

“Um, hey,” I said to the receptionist. It was difficult getting her attention, because she was fielding the telephone calls and raking in the lucre.

A dark-haired society dame in a hat was leaving the doctor’s inner sanctum. She was putting on sunglasses to hide eyes blackened from a recent facelift.

I cleared my throat and spoke like a mouse after the receptionist looked my way. “This painting’s signed ‘Vincent.’ Did Dr. Vincent do this painting?” The plastic surgeon’s name was Robert Vincent. I thought it wouldn’t be odd for a doctor to have a hobby and want to show off.

The receptionist shrugged and said blandly, “His wife I think paints. She might’ve painted that.” I wouldn’t swear those were her exact words, but close.

I don’t know what the receptionist’s excuse is. I can only speak for myself. If I’d been in a shrink’s office, I would figure the woman was humoring me. As it was, my own art index had an excuse for being out of kilter. A tractor-trailer driver ran his rig into the rear end of my Maverick, and my index was disconnected.

Numbly, I nodded and gazed politely at the picture of the sunflowers.

A glimmer of fire reached my brain by the time of my final appointment with Dr. Vincent.

“Gee,” I thought to myself, trying to ward off the dread about the final bill. “There must be some good in this doctor, or he wouldn’t let his wife exhibit her amateurish efforts in his ritzy office.”

The recovery of my art index was extended. I started noticing this same picture of sunflowers in lawyers’ offices and banks, made-to-order comfortable suburban houses and doctors’ offices south of Memphis.

What was this, some sort of network of admirers? Rich professionals sticking together? Still, I imagined, how dull for Mrs. Vincent, painting the same picture over and over again.

The lightning bolt of truth zapped one day as I was reading a magazine piece illustrated by a color reproduction of some sunflowers. I looked closely at the caption. “Sunflowers,” by Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent!

van Gogh!

I quailed at my fuzzy-minded beliefs. Never again would I believe a word from the mouths of doctors’ receptionists. My art index was recovered, as if jolted by electricity.

So when I heard the news about the sale of “Sunflowers” to somebody at Christie’s in London, I felt as if I were reading the community news about an old friend.

$39.8 million is a lot of lucre. My thoughts wander. I wonder about the secretive buyer’s motives. For all I know, he (or she) is a fiend who thinks that by buying the original he can quash all the existing prints that stare down from walls all across the world.

Or he could be some sucker who, unlike myself, is unenlightened and thinks he’s discovered a new talent in the handiwork of the mysterious Mrs. Robert Vincent.