In a letter dated November 15, 1889, Les XX organizer
Octave Maus invited van Gogh to exhibit at the January 1890 show. Van Gogh accepted in a letter dated November 20, 1889, that listed the six paintings, all size 30 canvases, to be displayed: :
1. Tournesols (
Sunflowers) :
2. Tournesols (
Sunflowers) :
3. Le lierre (
Ivy) :
4. Verger en fleurs (Arles) - Flowering Orchard (Arles) :
5. Champ de blé; soleil levant (Saint-Remy) - Wheat Field, Sunrise (Saint-Rémy) :
6. La Vigne rouge (Mont-Major) - Red Vineyard (Mont-) This was not the display order or arrangement that Van Gogh desired. No definitive documentation of his intentions or the actual display is known to survive. But on the back of Maus' letter, there is a pencil sketch that gives some hints for the display Van Gogh proposed and for its artistic background. Other hints can be compiled from other parts of Van Gogh's correspondence. In various letters, Van Gogh indicated that his two
Sunflowers were to be displayed on either side of
Ivy. To the left and right of this upright triptych, he wanted to place the
Flowering Orchard and the
Wheat Field at Sunrise. Finally, van Gogh indicated
Red Vineyard was to be hung (at the top or) underneath this arrangement. There is now agreement that Van Gogh's exhibit can be reconstructed in the order of paintings below:
"Impressions of Provence" The four landscapes depict traditional notions of the four seasons: flowering trees in spring, a shaded hiding place in the midst of ivy in summer, the vineyard harvest in autumn, and new wheat on the furrows in winter. In between the seasons were embedded the heraldic flowers of Provence: sunflowers, dear to the artistic and literary circles of the
Félibres, the néo-provencal movement around
Frédéric Mistral. These seasonal links are set not only in subject matter, but — and from Van Gogh's point of view even more important — reinforced by the choice of colour. Each of the six paintings is dominated by one of the six primary colours (yellow, red, blue, and their complementaries orange, green, and violet). He uses yellow and orange in the two Sunflowers-versions, red in the vineyard, green in the ivy, blue in the orchard, and violet in the field. Thus, the full colour spectrum is manifested in this selection, which can consequently be read as a single entity, "a whole" (French:
un tout). Earlier in 1889, Van Gogh had already expressed his wish before returning to the North to summarise his "impressions of Provence". ==Exhibition==