Netherlands: Amsterdam – The Van Gogh Museum

🕗 Beat the Crowds – Get There Early

We do like to try and avoid the crowds, so as always it was good to get there early. And we mean early. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is one of the most visited museums in the entire world, drawing somewhere north of two million visitors a year through its doors on Museumplein. As the morning wears on, the queues outside grow longer, the audio guides get snapped up faster, and the galleries start to feel like rush hour on the Central line. We arrived not long after opening and still managed to walk straight in, which felt like a minor triumph. By the time we left a couple of hours later, the place was absolutely heaving. So, you have been warned.

🎧 The Audio Tour – Worth Every Cent

Another thing we’d strongly recommend is the audio-guided tour. It was available in eleven different languages – which is handy, because the museum pulls in visitors from what feels like every corner of the planet – and you could rent a unit at the museum for just a few euros: €5 for adults, or a rather more generous €3 for those under seventeen. Given what you get for your money, it is frankly a bargain.

We are not always fans of audio tours, it has to be said. There is something faintly absurd about standing in front of a masterpiece with a little plastic handset clamped to your ear, shuffling forward like a confused tourist at a car boot sale. But this one was genuinely excellent. It did not talk down to you, it did not waffle, and it helped frame each room and each painting in a way that made the whole visit considerably more rewarding than simply wandering about going “oh, that’s nice.”

🖼️ Three Floors, One Extraordinary Life

The story of Vincent van Gogh is told across three floors of the museum, moving chronologically from his early life through to his eventual status as one of the most recognised and celebrated artists in history. It is a well-thought-out journey, and the curators have done a very good job of staging the works to show his remarkable development as an artist, placing his paintings alongside those of other artists who influenced him along the way.

Van Gogh was born in 1853 in Zundert, a small village in the Dutch province of North Brabant, the son of a Dutch Reformed Church minister. He came from a solidly middle-class family with strong links to the art world – three of his uncles were art dealers, which you might have thought would have given him a decent head start. It did not, particularly. He spent years lurching from one career to the next – art dealer, teacher, lay preacher – before finally, at the rather late age of twenty-seven, deciding that painting was what he was actually put on this earth to do. You have to admire the optimism.

What followed was one of the most intensely productive decades in the history of Western art, producing some of the most emotionally powerful and technically extraordinary works ever committed to canvas.

🗺️ Scattered Across the World

Sadly, many of Van Gogh’s works are located around the world, held in both private and public collections. The Starry Night, probably his most famous painting, lives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sunflowers pops up in London at the National Gallery. Others are in Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, and private hands we will never get a look at. Slightly maddening, if you think about it.

Luckily – and this is where van Gogh’s extraordinary work ethic saves the day – he was a quite astonishingly prolific artist. In the roughly ten years that he actually worked as a painter, from around 1881 until his death in 1890, he produced approximately 2,100 works: more than 860 oil paintings, alongside drawings, sketches, watercolours, and prints. That is a staggering output for any artist, let alone one who was also spending a fair amount of time being thoroughly miserable and unwell. It means that even with so many works scattered across the globe, the museum still has an enormous and deeply impressive collection to show you.

🧠 The Man Behind the Brushstrokes

The audio tour really helped to put Van Gogh’s journey into proper context – from his comfortable, middle-class upbringing in the Netherlands through to his tragic and premature death at just thirty-seven years old. And it is quite a journey, it must be said. Not an easy one.

Van Gogh’s mental health struggles are well documented, and the museum does not shy away from them. He suffered from what we would now likely describe as a combination of conditions including bipolar disorder and psychotic episodes, as well as periods of severe depression. He was admitted to various institutions over the years, most notably the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889, where he continued to paint with remarkable dedication – producing The Starry Night during his time there, which is either incredibly inspiring or deeply humbling depending on your own creative output.

What is particularly striking, and rather sad, is that Van Gogh was himself well aware of his fragile mental state. He wrote about it at length in his extraordinarily prolific correspondence – he exchanged over six hundred and fifty letters with his brother Theo, who was his greatest supporter and practically his sole source of financial sustenance throughout his painting career. Van Gogh knew he was unwell. The trouble was, as is so often the case, that this self-awareness did not make things better. Instead, it appeared to contribute to a downward spiral in which he neglected his physical health badly – eating poorly, drinking heavily, and generally treating himself with a level of care usually reserved for an old car you are thinking of scrapping anyway.

👂 The Ear, the Artist, and the Aftermath

His relationship with the fellow Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin – a complex, volatile, and often brilliant man who had abandoned a career as a stockbroker to paint in the South Seas – was one of the more turbulent episodes in art history. The two men lived together for a time in Arles in the south of France in late 1888, at what Van Gogh grandly called the Yellow House, with the intention of establishing an artists’ community. Gauguin was rather less enthusiastic about the arrangement than Van Gogh, and their relationship deteriorated rapidly.

In December 1888, following a particularly severe psychotic episode and a furious argument with Gauguin, Van Gogh famously took a razor and cut off a portion of his own left ear. He then, in a detail that never ceases to astonish, wrapped the severed portion in newspaper and presented it to a woman at a nearby brothel. Gauguin, understandably rattled, left Arles and the two men never saw each other again.

💔 A Life Cut Short

Vincent van Gogh died on the 29th of July 1890, in the small town of Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, where he had been living under the care of the homeopathic physician Dr Paul Gachet. He was thirty-seven years old. He had shot himself in the chest with a revolver two days earlier, in a wheat field just outside the town. He managed to walk back to the inn where he was staying before his wound was discovered, and he died in his room two days later, with his brother Theo at his side.

It was a desperately sad end for a man of such extraordinary talent. In his lifetime, Van Gogh sold precisely one painting – The Red Vineyard – and was considered by much of the art world as, at best, an eccentric. Today, his works regularly sell at auction for tens of millions of pounds, and The Starry Night alone is arguably the most recognised painting on the planet. Funny old world.

Unfortunately, as the museum gently makes clear, creative genius and mental fragility have a long and uncomfortable history of keeping each other company. Van Gogh was far from alone in that regard. But few cases are quite so stark, or so poignant, as his.