The Philadelphia Art Museum (PAM) will mount an exhibition next year bringing together two of Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “Sunflower” paintings, according to the Art Newspaper (TAN).
The exhibition, which is set to run from June 6 to October 11, 2026, will be titled “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow”. It will feature the PAM’s Sunflowers (1889), with its distinct turquoise background, and the artist’s original iteration of the subject Sunflowers (1888), with the better-known yellow background.
The exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two institutions. The PAM loaned its Sunflowers to the National Gallery last year for an show, marking the first time the work had left the museum since its acquisition in 1963. The National Gallery Sunflowers, which it acquired in 1924, has only traveled abroad four times.
A PAM spokesperson told TAN that the exhibition “will bring together two Sunflower paintings, considering how the artist used color and brushwork to different expressive effects.”
At the National Gallery exhibition, titled “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers”, the two paintings hung in a triptych arrangement with the artist’s 1889 portrait Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse), now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hanging the middle. The display was one that was originally conceived of by van Gogh, according to the National Gallery.
Ahead of that exhibition, the PAM Sunflowers was reframed, ditching an ornate frame that it had likely had for a century, according to TAN. The museum opted for a simpler frame similar to the one the National Gallery had put on its Sunflowers in 1999.
The news of the PAM exhibition comes days after the museum’s director was terminated for “cause” by the museum’s board of trustees, according to a report by Philadelphia Magazine. Though it is not entirely clear what that cause was, it has been widely reported that the decision was likely related to the museum’s controversial rebranding, which include a new identity and a name change: the Philadelphia Museum of Art would now be known as the Philadelphia Art Museum.
