Van Gogh’s Lost Painting

The painting “Five Sunflowers in a Vase” by Vincent van Gogh was part of a series created in Arles in 1888, but it was destroyed during a bombing in 1945. However, recent discoveries of a black and white collector’s image and a color photo have allowed for a reconstruction of the painting’s appearance. This innovative process involved utilizing high resolution scanned data from another painting of van Gogh: Sunflowers (1888) recorded at the National Gallery in London. This was crucial to be able to exctract the brushstrokes in order to recreate the surface texture.

To reconstruct the painting, I meticulously utilized a 3D “cut-and-paste” technique. This process aimed to faithfully use an alphabet of Van Gogh´s thick impasto brushmarks that I could then usein alignment with the reference the photograph of the lost painting..