VINCENT VAN GOGH THE SUNFLOWERS It is a series of oil paintings made by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh painted the first four paintings in August 1888, when he lived in Arles, in the south of France, and three similar ones in January of the following year. The paintings are all executed on canvases of about 90 x 70 cm. He used a pigment in his sunflowers, lead chrome yellow, to which they owe their mysterious and enigmatic color. The decomposition of lead due to exposure to light turned the original bright yellow into a greenish-brown tone. Van Gogh settled in France in March 1886, after a harsh winter in which his father died and he suffered financial hardship. Encouraged by his brother Theo, he settled in Paris, the capital of art at that time, where there was an atmosphere of artistic effervescence, caused by the appearance a few years before of impressionism.