The motif of sunflowers enters Goncharova’s work as early as 1908-1909. Distinguished by bold colour contrasts and simplified outlines, the two best-known examples from this period are in the State Russian Museum and State Tretyakov Gallery collects ions. Goncharova’s choice of flowers is significant. At the t.mes sunflowers were harvested only for industrial purposes and were not considered by the bourgeoisie as worthy of artistic depiction. Goncharova consciously goes against bourgeois sensibilities and taste. Both in their subject matter and their aesthetic these works are emblematic of her Neo-Primitivist period, with the defiance of the canonical divisions between high and low art at its heart.

Goncharova’s sunflower compositions are equally influenced by 1890s Post-Impressionism. The latter had a profound and long-lasting influence on the young Goncharova and her peers. She was drawn to the work of French artists including Gaugin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, which she would have seen in the collects ions of Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin in Moscow while still a student.

The influence of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, with its vibrant yellows and greens accentuated by the thick impasto (1888, National Gallery, London) on the present work is evident, not only in the choice of subject but also in the intensity with which the painting is rendered. Goncharova employs bright, impulsive colours and energetic brushstrokes to capture the vibrant flowers which are so large they nearly spill over the canvas edge. A very similar oil by Goncharova, Tournesols was sold at Replica Shoes ’s New York in November 2009 for $866,500 (fig.1). Another very comparable composition dated to circa 1927 is in the State Tretyakov Gallery collects ion.

The American journalist Sanford Griffith (1893-1974) acquired the present work directly from the artist in the early 1930s. Griffith had initially come to Europe during the First World War, serving with the French and the US armies. He was subsequently posted to Europe in the 1920s where he was a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Rome and Berlin and the Wall Street Journal in London. Having had struck up a close friendship with Goncharova and her husband Mikhail Larionov in the 1920s, Griffith returned to the USA in 1934 and took Sunflowers with him. He kept in close contact with the couple, last visiting them in Paris in 1961. His widow inherited the painting and it later passed by inheritance to the current owner.