Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [72]
As you might expect, the museum can get very crowded, and the queues can be long, so come early to avoid the crush or book online.
The Museum Quarter and the Vondelpark | Museumplein | The Van Gogh Museum |
The collection
Just beyond the museum entrance, a flight of stairs leads to the first floor, where the paintings of van Gogh are presented in chronological order. The first go back to the artist’s early years (1880–85) in Holland and Belgium: dark, sombre works in the main, ranging from an assortment of drab grey and brown still lifes to the gnarled faces and haunting, flickering light of The Potato Eaters – one of van Gogh’s best-known paintings, and the culmination of hundreds of studies of the local peasantry.
Further along, the sobriety of these early works is easily transposed onto the urban landscape of Paris (1886–88), particularly in the View of Paris, where the city’s domes and rooftops hover below Montmartre under a glowering, blustery sky. But before long, under the sway of fellow painters and the sheer colour of the city itself, van Gogh’s approach began to change. This is most noticeable in two of his many self-portraits and in the pictures from Asnières, just outside Paris, where the artist used to go regularly to paint. In particular, look out for the surprisingly soft hues and gentle tones of his Courting Couples, and the disturbing yellows of Still Life with Quinces and Lemons. There’s also a rare photograph of van Gogh in Asnières (though it’s only of his back), which shows him in conversation with the artist Emile Bernard.
In February 1888 van Gogh moved to Arles, inviting Gauguin to join him a little later (see "Van Gogh’s ear"). With the change of scenery came a heightened interest in colour, and the predominance of yellow as a recurring motif; it’s represented best in such paintings as The Harvest, and most vividly in the disconcerting juxtapositions of Bedroom in Arles. Also from this period comes a striking canvas from the artist’s Sunflowers series, justly one of his most lauded works, and intensely – almost obsessively – rendered in the deepest oranges, golds and ochres he could find. Gauguin told of van Gogh painting these flowers in a near-trance; there were usually sunflowers in jars all over their house – in fact, they can be seen in Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh from the same period, also displayed in this section.
During his time at the asylum in St Rémy, van Gogh’s approach to nature became more abstract, as evidenced by his unsettling Wheatfield with a Reaper, the dense, knotty Undergrowth and his palpable Irises. Van Gogh is at his most expressionistic here, the paint applied thickly, often with a palette knife, a practice he continued in his final, tortured works painted at Auvers-sur-Oise, where he lodged for the last three months of his life. It was at Auvers that he painted the frantic Wheatfield with Crows, in which the fields swirl and writhe under weird and dark skies, as well as the organized chaos of Tree Roots and the glowering Wheatfield under Thunderclouds.
The second and third floors provide a backup to the lead collection. The second floor has temporary displays on themes related to van Gogh as well as a study area with PC access to a detailed