Van Gogh spent months anticipating Gauguin's arrival at the Yellow House, working, in his own words, like a steam engine to have as much to show his guest as possible. He decorated the house himself, had gas lines run downstairs so the two men could paint into the evening, and hung his best recent work, including the sunflower still lifes, in the room set aside for his friend^[1]. He worked on the flowers only in the mornings, since they wilted too fast to paint over several sittings, and was proud enough of the results to tell Theo that if by the age of forty he had painted a figure as good as these flowers, he would count himself the equal of any artist^[1].

Van Gogh originally planned a full dozen sunflower panels, describing the project to Theo as a symphony in blue and yellow, but completed only four before turning to other subjects for the guest room^[4]. He later wrote that the paintings changed character and grew richer the longer one looked at them, and drew a distinction between his sunflowers and the signature flowers of other painters he knew: the peony belonged to Jeannin, the hollyhock to Quost, but the sunflower, he said, was somewhat his own^[3].

Gauguin praised the finished paintings highly, and his own later portrait of Van Gogh at work, The Painter of Sunflowers, stands as a tribute to how closely the two men associated the flowers with their brief shared household^[3]. The goodwill did not last through the autumn: over roughly nine weeks together, Gauguin completed seventeen canvases to Van Gogh's twenty-five, tensions rose over money, reputation and artistic direction, and the two men argued with increasing frequency as the household grew strained^[4].