Spot the difference: Two versions of Van Gogh's iconic Sunflowers go on show together for the first time

Copy owned by museum in Amsterdam will be displayed with original



Versions of Sunflowers displayed together in public only once, in 2001

Loans between galleries, which almost never allow them to travel, are rare



Two versions of Vincent Van Gogh's iconic Sunflowers painting will be reunited when they are displayed alongside each other for the first time .

In a rare loan, the copy of Sunflowers owned by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will be put on show side-by-side with the London original in the Netherlands this year.

Next year the Amsterdam copy with travel for the first time to the National Gallery in London.



The sunflower on the left, the London version, is painted with rougher strokes than the Dutch version on the right, which was painted five months later



The first piece was one of four created at Arles, in the south of France, in August 1888 while the second was one of three 'repetitions' Van Gogh produced in January 1889.

They have been displayed together in public only once before in 2001, as part of a joint exhibition between the Van Gogh Museum and Art Institute Chicago.

Only five of the series are on show to the public, the others are at Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany, the U.S. at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Sompo Japan Museum of Art in Tokyo.

These galleries rarely allow their versions to travel, but the British and Dutch galleries have agreed to mark the end a ten-year research project by the Van Gogh Museum, which is also celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Axel Ruger, director of the Dutch museum, said: 'The biggest outcome of the [research project] is that we can counter a common perception about Van Gogh - that he was mad, that he attacked the canvas and worked in a manic way and just cranked out these works.



'What the research has shown is that he worked very carefully. He studied other artists. He studied colour theory. He had a huge repertoire of works that he had seen in galleries kept in his head.

Gauguin captured Van Gogh at the easel painting sunflowers, a subject the Dutch artist rendered many times

'He approached his art-making in a very methodical way. That's quite different from common perceptions of him as the artist who madly throws paint at the canvas.'



Visitors will be able to see the changes that Van Gogh introduced in the Amsterdam copy, which is brighter and features a sunflower with blue seeds.

The differences betray a fundamental change in the artist's approach, an expert at the museum said.

Louis van Tilborgh, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, told The Times that the London original was intended as a radical work to impress Paul Gauguin, with whom Van Gogh wished to collaborate.

A self portrait by Vincent Van Gogh who painted a series of Sunflowers that are on show around the world

'The first one was meant to be simply a statement by Van Gogh to show Gaughin that he was able to join the modern art movement as Gauguin had,' he said. 'It's what you would call a primitive kind of idea of sunflowers.'



The Amsterdam copy, created after Gaughin had left Arles, had an entirely different purpose. The flowers became symbols of the artists' shared time in Arles, so rather than emphasise them wilting he made them bold and bright.



'He wanted the flowers to shine like candles, so what you see in our picture is that he is changing his mind, adjusting the meaning of the painting.'



The National Gallery's painting was bought for the nation in 1924 for £1,308. The copy now held in Japan bought by Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto at Christie's in 1987 for a then-record £25million.

The price was over four times the previous record of about $12million paid for Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi in 1985.

The record was broken a few months later with the purchase of another Van Gogh, Irises, by Alan Bond for $53.9million at Sotheby's, New York on November 11, 1987.