When a fire tore through the Japanese collector Koyata Yamamoto’s home in 1945, art history lost one of its rarest treasures: Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh. Unlike the more famous sunflower canvases now in London and Munich, this painting was last seen in public in 1920 and is now known only through black-and-white photographs and a handful of written descriptions. Its disappearance has left a gap in the celebrated series that van Gogh painted in Arles during the summer of 1888, a time when he was preparing for the arrival of Paul Gauguin and dreaming of an artists’ community in the south of France. In this work, van Gogh focused on a simple vase holding five sunflowers, each at a different stage of bloom and decay.

The flowers burst outward, their thick petals and heavy heads rendered in bold, swirling brushstrokes that seem to pulse with energy. The background, likely a pale blue or green, sets off the ochre and gold of the blooms, creating a vivid contrast that draws the eye to the heart of each flower. Unlike Jan Brueghel the Elder’s meticulous floral arrangements, van Gogh was less concerned with botanical accuracy than with capturing the life and movement he saw in the flowers themselves.

For him, sunflowers were more than a motif—they were symbols of gratitude and friendship, painted with the hope of welcoming a fellow artist. The physical journey of Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers is both brief and dramatic. Painted in August 1888, it was one of several sunflower still lifes van Gogh created in rapid succession, each intended to decorate the Yellow House in Arles. After van Gogh’s death, the painting passed through various hands before being acquired by Yamamoto in the early twentieth century.

Its destruction during World War II has made it a legendary lost work, intensifying the fascination with van Gogh’s sunflower series and the feverish creativity of his Arles period. Today, its absence is felt as keenly as the presence of its surviving siblings, a reminder of both the fragility and enduring power of art.