Van Gogh painted for only about ten years, and this museum owns more of that decade than anywhere else: some two hundred paintings, five hundred drawings and seven hundred letters. Almost all of it was kept by his brother Theo, who supported him and could not sell the work, and it passed down through the family. The rooms are hung in the order the pictures were made, so the change in the painter happens as you walk. First come the brown, thickly painted Dutch peasants of the early years. 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 were written to 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 too: the paint stands several millimetres off the canvas, and from the side you can see which way every stroke was pulled. Almond Blossom, painted as a present for a newborn nephew and calmer than anything near it, hangs on an upper floor that most visitors reach with their attention already spent.