I sit on the bench opposite Sunflowers once a month, give or take. Usually on the way back from something in London. Train into Charing Cross, ten minutes in Room 43, train home. A small private detour. You get blocked, sitting on that bench. People walk up and stand in front of you and you become a witness to a thing you didn’t mean to witness.
A man in his twenties came in last time. He spotted the painting from the doorway. I watched his face do the small click of recognition, oh, that one, and made a beeline. Phone already up. He stood in front of it for, I’d say, a fraction of a second. Selfie. Gone. He didn’t read the label. He didn’t step back. He didn’t look at the painting after the phone came down. He had collected it.
I want to be careful here.
I have taken photos of Sunflowers myself. More than once. I have stood where he stood and done a version of what he did. So this is not the piece where the older man tuts at the young man with the phone. We are in the same room doing the same thing, mostly.
But the bench gives you a different view.
From the bench you can see how long people stay. The average is somewhere under ten seconds. The selfie people are quicker. The audio guide people are longer but they’re listening to a voice in their ear, not looking. The school groups flow through like water. Every so often someone sits down next to me and just looks, and you can tell within twenty seconds whether they’re going to stay or get up again. Most get up.
Van Gogh painted this in August 1888 in Arles. He did it fast and full of hope, expecting Gauguin to arrive any day. He wanted the yellow room ready. There are fifteen flowers in the vase. Some are blooming, some are dying. He didn’t know yet that Gauguin would come and it would end badly and he would cut off part of his ear before Christmas. The painting doesn’t know that either. It is still full of hope, on a wall in London, every day.
You cannot get that from a selfie.
You probably cannot get that from a bench either, not all of it. But you get closer.
I don’t think the young man did anything wrong. He collected a thing. He’ll have it on his phone. It will be one of forty thousand photos he never opens. The painting will not mind. It has been looked at and not-looked-at for a hundred and thirty-seven years and it is doing fine.
What I notice from the bench is just this. The painting is the wine. The phone is the styrofoam cup. And most of us, most days, are drinking the wine from the cup and telling ourselves it tastes the same.
It does not taste the same.
I caught the 17:43 home.
Sea's The Day 