We Build LEGO Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers, Which Contains a Hidden Surprise for Art Lovers

It's of a size and scope that means to be taken seriously. Yes, this is a tribute to one of the most famous artworks in the world. But it also demands to be hung up in a dwelling space as art – an important distinction to make, as LEGO continues its slow evolution from adult curiosity to adult hobby.

Vincent van Gogh painted his most famous sequence of Sunflowers while he lived in Arles, France, a prolific period in his artistic life. Van Gogh had a strong emotional connection to the sunflower and associated it with gratitude. He approached it as an artistic muse of sorts, writing in a letter to a friend:

"If [Georges] Jeannin has the peony, [Ernest] Quost the hollyhock, I indeed, before others, have taken the sunflower."

In August 1888, van Gogh painted four versions of sunflowers in a vase. He revisited this motif in January 1889, when he painted a repetition of the third version and two different repetitions of the fourth version.

Of these seven paintings, the fourth version and its two repetitions are the most famous. The original fourth version (F454) is on display at the National Gallery in London, England. One repetition (F457) is on display at Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan. And the other repetition (F458) – probably the most iconic due to its color composition and overall vividness – is on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Established in 1973, the Van Gogh Museum partnered with LEGO to release LEGO Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers, a tribute to the F458 repetition of the painting. It is rendered as a three-dimensional relief and uses abstract pieces to replicate van Gogh's thick brushstrokes.

When you open the box, you get 34 numbered bags and a printed instruction booklet with a QR code. Following this code will lead you to a podcast discussing van Gogh and the inspirations behind his work.

I appreciated the build's real-world practicality. First, you build the painting's frame, which I completed and subsequently leaned against the wall, where it waited. And second, you build the canvas with the painting on top of it.

You finish the build by mounting the canvas into the frame and fastening it with pins. It's a nice, personal touch to mimic a real-life process of staging and presentation, and it subliminally gives the completed set a sense of value and importance.

There is an awesome Easter egg buried in the canvas' construction. When art experts studied F458, they discovered that late into the painting process, Van Gogh extended the height of the canvas with a wooden strip at the top – likely to ensure that the sunflowers had space and didn't appear cramped.

LEGO humorously mirrored this imperfection in the build – first by having you build the canvas as a single entity, and then by having you affix a separate, corresponding strip at the top afterward with pins. You can see it circled in red in the photo below. The LEGO designers even used brown bricks to mimic the appearance of wood.

This is such a superfluous, unnecessary detail to the final product, and that's exactly why I love it so much. It's imperceptible to any onlooker; no one but the individual builder would even know it's there. But that's a feeling for the LEGO builder to experience – the trial and error that even a master experiences while creating a masterpiece. It also creates a feeling of exclusivity; the LEGO builder can decide whether to reveal the secret to onlookers when showing it off.

The process of building the full-bloom sunflowers is a bit tedious, if unavoidable. There's likely no "fun" way to create a sunflower that looks this convincing. And in a way, the repetitiveness is the point; van Gogh didn't cut corners, either. Just take breaks in between. This is not the sort of build that one 'speed runs' anyway. Savor it and get your money's worth.

What I especially enjoyed were the wilting flowers, and the ones represented in profile rather than head-on. When I first started building them, they seemed so abstract and random. But when you take a literal step back from the painting, they make sense. And what seemed random in closeup is a stem or a leaf in context.

The most frequent question I get from other adults is, "After you build a LEGO set, where do you put it?" This time, there's an easy, obvious answer: right on my dining room wall. And that might be the best way for potential builders to think about this set. You know exactly where it's going to go after you're finished it. You can look forward to that. And you'll be able to enjoy it long after you've finished it. It's been a week since I completed it, and I still enjoy looking at it, and seeing which three-dimensional details spring out to me this time. This is the first great LEGO set of 2025, and it comes highly recommended.

LEGO Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers, Set #31215, retails for $199.99, and it is composed of 2615 pieces. It is available exclusively at the LEGO Store.

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Kevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He's also been published in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.