Van Gogh painted a famous series of which flower?

Sunflowers, painted in Arles in 1888 to decorate the room he was preparing for Gauguin - which is a detail worth holding onto, because the most reproduced paintings in Western art were made as guest-room decor by a man trying very hard to impress a friend who would leave within months.

The yellow is the reason they exist and the reason they are in trouble. Chrome yellow had only recently become available as a cheap bright pigment, and Van Gogh used it enthusiastically. It is chemically unstable in light: the lead chromate reduces and darkens, so the sunflowers are turning slowly brown, and conservation science has spent years establishing that nothing can be done to reverse it. What people admire is already a faded version.

He painted several, and the versions are scattered across London, Munich, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Tokyo. One was destroyed by fire in Japan in 1945. Another sold in 1987 for a figure that was then the highest ever paid for a painting, which had the odd effect of making a picture of flowers in a jug into a financial news story - roughly a century after he had failed to sell it at all.