Van Gogh Museum

The story

Vincent van Gogh painted for ten years, from 1880 to 1890. He sold almost nothing. When he shot himself in July 1890, his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, owned most of what he had made. Theo died six months later.

Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, was left with a baby son and hundreds of unsold canvases. Friends told her to throw them away. Instead she lent them to exhibitions, sold a few at a time, and in 1914 published Vincent's letters. By the time she died in 1925 he was famous.

Her son, also called Vincent, put the collection into a foundation in 1962, and the Dutch state built this museum for it. It opened on 2 June 1973.

What is here

One ticket covers the permanent collection and the current exhibition. There are no separate exhibition fees.

If you have one minute

In front of the Sunflowers

Van Gogh painted sunflowers in Arles in the summer of 1888 to decorate the room of his friend Paul Gauguin, who was coming to stay. This one is a repeat he made in January 1889, after their quarrel and the night he cut off his ear.

Almost everything is yellow: yellow flowers, yellow vase, yellow wall. New chrome yellow paint made that possible. Some of the yellow is slowly turning brown, and the museum keeps the light low to slow it.

Nearby hangs Almond Blossom, white branches on a blue sky. He painted it in February 1890 for the birth of Theo's son, named Vincent after him. The boy grew up with it over his bed. It is the boy's museum, in a way.

Things people often get wrong

"The Starry Night is here." It is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"Wheatfield with Crows was his last painting." Films and books like to say so. His letters suggest he painted several pictures after it.

"He sold only one painting in his life." One sale is well known, The Red Vineyard. Records show a few other sales and exchanges. He was poor all the same.

"You can buy tickets at the door." There is no ticket desk. Every ticket is sold online with a time slot.

Films, songs and books

Lust for Life (1956), with Kirk Douglas as Vincent. Loving Vincent (2017), a Polish and British film painted frame by frame in oils by more than a hundred painters. At Eternity's Gate (2018), with Willem Dafoe. Each of them borrows scenes from paintings that hang here.

The American singer Don McLean's song Vincent (1971) is the best-known song about him. In China, Li Zhi's folk song Mr. Van Gogh (梵高先生) has been sung by a generation of students.

His Letters, published by Jo in 1914, are read as literature in many languages. In Chinese they appear as 《亲爱的提奥》.

People who stood here

We searched Dutch, English and Japanese sources for this list. Van Gogh himself never saw this building.

• Jo van Gogh-Bonger (Theo's widow, 1862–1925)Without her there would be no museum and perhaps no famous Van Gogh. She ran a guest house to live, kept the paintings, and spent thirty years making the world look at them.
• Vincent Willem van Gogh (Theo's son, 1890–1978)An engineer, he refused all offers from collectors, set up the foundation in 1962 and spoke at the opening in 1973. The Almond Blossom was painted for his birth.
• Queen Juliana of the NetherlandsShe opened the museum on 2 June 1973 and was shown round by the painter's nephew.
• Gerrit Rietveld (Dutch architect and designer)He designed the main building in 1963–64, a calm block of light and open stairs. He died in 1964 and never saw it built. His red and blue chair is in many museums of the world.
• Kisho Kurokawa (Japanese architect)He designed the oval exhibition wing of 1999, half sunk into the ground behind the main building. It was largely paid for by a Japanese insurance company that had bought one of the Sunflowers in 1987.
• Akira Kurosawa (Japanese film director)In his film Dreams (1990) a young painter walks into Van Gogh's pictures and meets Vincent, played by Martin Scorsese, in a field of crows.

Go deeper: seven stops, from the potato eaters to the almond tree

The collection is hung in order of his life: the Netherlands, Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy, Auvers. Take the stairs and follow him.

1. The building and the square

Three buildings stand here. Rietveld's square main block of 1973. Kurokawa's grey oval of 1999. And between them, since 2015, a glass entrance hall facing the Museumplein.

When the museum opened, critics found Rietveld's building plain. Inside it was what he wanted: daylight from above and stairs open to the whole height, so you always see where you are.

2. The Netherlands: dark and heavy

He began late, at twenty-seven, after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a preacher. In the village of Nuenen in 1885 he painted The Potato Eaters, a farming family eating by lamplight. He wanted them to look as if they had dug the potatoes with the same hands.

The colours are brown and green, like the old Dutch masters he admired. Then he went to Paris.

3. Paris: colour, and Japan

In Paris from 1886 to 1888 he lived with Theo and met the Impressionists. He painted himself again and again, because a model cost money and a mirror did not. In the grey felt hat the brushstrokes circle his head like a halo.

He also collected Japanese woodblock prints, hundreds of them, cheaply from a Paris dealer. Here he copied Hiroshige's flowering plum tree in oils, and filled the borders with Japanese characters he could not read.

For this courtesan he copied a figure by Keisai Eisen from the cover of a Paris magazine, and added frogs and cranes. In the French slang of his day, grue (crane) and grenouille (frog) were both words for a prostitute. That was his joke.

The museum keeps about five hundred of his Japanese prints. He went south to Arles, he wrote, because it was the Japan of the South.

4. Arles: the yellow house

In 1888 he rented four rooms in a yellow house on a square in Arles and dreamed of a house for artists. This is the house, with his windows open. It was destroyed by bombing in 1944.

The Bedroom is his own room inside it. He wanted it to say rest. Count the two of everything: two chairs, two pillows, two pictures side by side. He was waiting for a friend. Gauguin came in October and left after the crisis of 23 December.

5. Saint-Rémy: the asylum

In May 1889 he went of his own will into an asylum at Saint-Rémy. Between attacks of illness he painted irises, olive groves, cypresses and the wall of the garden. He made about 150 paintings there in a year.

It was there, in February 1890, that the news of Theo's son came, and he painted the almond tree. He wrote that it was perhaps his best and most patiently worked thing.

6. Auvers: the last weeks

In May 1890 he moved to Auvers, north of Paris, and painted about seventy pictures in seventy days. Wheatfield with Crows is wide and low, under a dark sky. Many read it as despair. He himself wrote of the health and strength he found in the countryside.

On 27 July he shot himself in a field, and died two days later with Theo beside him. He was thirty-seven.

7. The letters, and the theft

About 820 of Vincent's letters survive, most of them to Theo. The museum shows a few at a time, because light damages them. All are online, in Dutch, French and English.

On 7 December 2002 thieves came in by a ladder through the roof and took two early paintings. They were found in Italy in 2016, in a house belonging to a drug gang, and came home in 2017.

In 1885, the year of the potato eaters, China had just ended its war with France. In 1890, the year he died, Zhang Zhidong was founding the Hanyang ironworks. Within a century his sunflowers were printed on posters in Beijing student dormitories.