My gaze is clear as a sunflower

Paul Nash’s fascination with aerial bombardment led him to an ecstatic vision of “the sky blossoming with floating flowers”. This, and William Blake’s poem “Ah Sunflower”, inspired his late paintings, in which an airborne sunflower glides over imagined landscapes. Nash was seriously ill with asthma (he died of heart failure in 1946) and his growing sense of mortality is reflected in this final work. Broken from its stem, the blackened head of the sunflower and its wilting petals fall away into the smoky darkness. But Nash’s belief in the mythical cycle of death and rebirth gives the viewer a cause for hope. The flower’s head detaches from its stem like a spirit departing from the body. – Alistair Curtis

Eclipse of the Sunflower, Paul Nash 1945

Étienne Leopold Trouvelot (1827-1895) was another artist with a fascination for celestial phenomena. He was also an amateur astronomer. He traveled with a party from the US Naval Observatory to ‘separation’ – a desolate outpost in Wyoming Territory to observe the Eclipse of July 29, 1878. He produced this image of the 1878 eclipse of the sun by the process of chromolithography that involved applying a water-resistant medium to lithography stones,

More at Total Eclipse of the Art: Trouvelot and the 1878 Eclipse