Van Gogh Museum

Museum · Museum QuarterAmsterdam,Netherlands

The largest collection of Van Gogh's ten working years, in Amsterdam, hung in the order he painted them with his letters beside the canvases.

The Van Gogh Museum owns more of the painter's ten working years than anywhere else: some two hundred paintings, five hundred drawings and seven hundred letters. The rooms are hung in the order the pictures were made, so the change in him happens as you walk. First the brown, thickly painted Dutch peasants. Then Paris, where the colour turns bright within months of his seeing the Impressionists. Then Arles, the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and the last summer at Auvers. He was thirty-seven when he died. The letters are shown beside the paintings they discuss, and they change how the work reads. Most went to his brother Theo, and they deal with money, materials and what he was trying to do with a particular colour rather than with suffering. The surfaces repay a close look: the paint stands several millimetres off the canvas, and from the side you can see which way every stroke was pulled. Almond Blossom hangs on an upper floor that most visitors reach with their attention already spent, and it is calmer than anything near it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Start at the bottom and go up in order — the collection is hung chronologically, and taken out of sequence it becomes a greatest-hits room rather than ten years of a working life.
Stand at an angle to the canvases — from the side the paint reads as ridges and gouges rather than image, and the speed he worked at becomes visible.
They are letters about work — money, materials and what he was attempting, not about suffering; the tortured-genius version comes from later biography rather than from his own hand.
The last floor is the quiet one — most visitors have spent their attention by then, which is where the Almond Blossom hangs.

Things to do

1
Walk the ten years in order
Begin with The Potato Eaters, dark and clumsy and painted by someone still learning, and keep going. Two rooms later Paris has happened and the palette is unrecognisable. The whole change takes ten years and roughly twenty minutes of walking.
2
Look at one canvas from the side
Step to the edge of any late painting and look across the surface rather than at it. The paint stands in ridges several millimetres high, laid down wet into wet, and you can see which direction each stroke was pulled and how fast.
3
Read one letter all the way through
Original sheets are shown through the galleries beside the work they discuss, with headphones so you can hear a passage read aloud in the room it belongs to. Pick one and read the whole of it rather than the caption beside it. The handwriting is small, fast and level, and nothing in it sounds like a man expecting to be remembered.