Two of Vincent Van Gogh’s legendary Sunflowers paintings will be reunited in London for the first time since they left the troubled artist’s studio in 1889.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is lending its painting to the National Gallery – the first time it has left the US since it was bought in 1935 – where it will go show with the National Gallery’s own version of Van Gogh’s great work.
The US painting dates from January 1889 and was bought by a US collector in 1935 before going to the museum while the National Gallery painting was done a year earlier.
Van Gogh gave it to his brother in 1889 and the gallery bought it from the family in 1924.
The Dutch painter, who killed himself aged just 37 in 1890, painted a handful of still lifes of sunflowers.
One was sold at auction at Christies for £24 million in 1987 just as the boom in art prices was beginning and would now be worth hundreds of millions of pounds if it came onto the open market.
The pictures will form part of the gallery’s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers which runs from September 14 to January 19 next year and marks a century since the London gallery acquired the famous painting as well as another striking still-life, Chair, painted in the same year.
It is the first time the gallery had devoted an exhibition to Van Gogh and will include more than 50 works gathered from galleries and museums around the world.
Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, London, said: “This is the first exhibition devoted to Van Gogh ever held at the National Gallery. It marks two centuries of the Gallery’s existence and one since its acquisition of the Sunflowers. Museums and collectors have been astoundingly generous in lending great paintings to this show.”