Sadly, no letter exists to tell us the words that finally persuaded Mme Van Gogh to finally give up Sunflowers.

“Of course we wish we would have kept both but it would probably have proven very expensive.”īut Courtauld and his fellow trustees did get the painting that they always wanted. “So it was swapped straight away.” The postman is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Postman Roulin was only part of the collection for a few weeks, it really never went as far having an accession number,” Robbins says. I do not like it so well as I thought at first… I should welcome the opportunity of exchanging it for a better picture.” His concerns were taken on board and the painting was swapped. He wrote to Charles Aitken, the director of the Tate Gallery, that he felt “a little bit doubtful about ‘the postman’. They settled the deal on Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) and Portrait of Joseph Roulin (1889), depicting the Dutch master’s postman friend in Arles, instead.Ĭourtauld, however, had second thoughts. “And from the start, they know that Van Gogh’s signature work is Sunflowers, and this is what they were aiming to buy in the first place.”īut Madame Van Gogh, the wife of Van Gogh’s late brother Theo, was managing Vincent’s estate and was reluctant to part with it because she “was too emotionally connected to the painting to agree to the purchase”, Robbins says. “The Courtauld Fund trustees take a great interest in this exhibition as a place from where they might be able to purchase some works,” Anne Robbins, the curator of Courtauld Impressionists, tells us on the podcast. In the autumn of 1923, a big Van Gogh retrospective-the first in the UK-was held at the Leicester Galleries in London.

Many of the paintings that now bring hordes of visitors to the National Gallery’s rooms of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists were acquired through a fund set up by the British textiles magnate.īut as we find out in a discussion of the National Gallery’s exhibition Courtauld Impressionists on the latest podcast from The Art Newspaper, one of the most famous works acquired by the Courtauld fund, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), may never have made it onto the National’s walls-it was only Courtauld’s determination to get the very best works which eventually led to its acquisition. Samuel Courtauld’s impact on the national collection in Britain was seismic.

Joseph roulin