VAN GOGH MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the Van Gogh Museum in brief

Along with Rembrandt van Rijn, he is still the superstar among Dutch painters – Vincent van Gogh. The Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of the painter in the world and is accordingly one of the highlights of a visit to Amsterdam. With over two million visitors, the Van Gogh Museum is even more popular than the neighboring Rijksmuseum.

The history of the Van Gogh Museum

When van Gogh died in 1890 at the age of 37, he left behind a very extensive oeuvre of about 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings. He sold only a few of these and gave some of his works to friends. His estate was inherited by his younger brother, the art dealer Theo van Gogh. In addition to Vincent’s works, he had also collected works by artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Léon Lhermitte and Jean-François Millet. After Theo died just one year after his brother, his widow Johanna van Gogh administered the inheritance. She returned to the Netherlands and organized the first exhibitions of Vincent van Gogh’s works and made a significant contribution to making the artist known to a wider public.

In 1905, the first major exhibition was held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1960, Johanna’s son Vincent Willem van Gogh finally founded the Vincent van Gogh Foundation and handed over the collection to it. Initially, the paintings were moved to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as a permanent exhibition, before the independent Van Gogh Museum was opened at its present location in 1973.

The building of the Van Gogh Museum

The museum consists of two buildings. The original building houses the permanent collection. In 1999, a supplementary building for special exhibitions was inaugurated, designed in the shape of an ellipse. In 2015, the exhibition building was supplemented by a new, extensively glazed entrance area.

The collection of the Van Gogh Museum

The museum owns over 200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh and 400 of his drawings from all creative periods. Among the main works on display are The Potato Eaters, The Bedroom in Arles, and a version of Sunflowers (Van Gogh often painted several versions of the same subject). In addition, the museum preserves the majority of Vincent van Gogh’s letters. Also found in the collection is van Gogh’s suicide weapon. The collection of works by other 19th-century artists, begun by Theo van Gogh, has been continually expanded with foundation funds, so that the museum exhibits a variety of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in addition to Van Gogh.