Van Gogh Museum

The Van Gogh Museum houses a permanent collection dedicated to the best works of art by Vincent van Gogh and several temporary exhibitions.

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born in Zundert, the Netherlands, in 1853. After receiving a good education, part of which took place in a boarding school, Vincent worked for an art dealer, where he discovered his vocation.

Van Gogh felt lonely as an artist and decided to create an art residency in Arles where he and other similar-minded artists would live and share ideas. The first artist he invited was Paul Gauguin.

Two days before Christmas in 1888, van Gogh had his first mental breakdown when Gauguin announced that he wanted to leave Arles. In a frenzy, Vincent cut off part of his left ear.

One year later, van Gogh was voluntarily hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital. During the year he spent confined in the ward he lost touch with reality and became extremely depressed.

His mental health worsened with time and the artist finally shot himself in the chest in 1890. He died two days later, aged only 37 years old. During his lifetime, he only sold one painting.

The museum

The modern Van Gogh Museum houses over 200 paintings, 500 drawings, and hundreds of letters written by the artist.

The first floor of the foundation features many of the Dutch artists’ paintings and relates his personal story through the paintings.

These are placed chronologically and show how the painter evolved from landscape paintings to his later tortured work.

The museum reflects some of the investigations carried out on some of van Gogh’s pieces of art and other paintings that were wrongly attributed to him on the second floor.

On the third and last floor is a collection of nineteenth-century paintings, where visitors can see how other contemporary artists related to van Gogh’s work.

Skip the lines

The Van Gogh Museum is the second most visited museum in Amsterdam, so the queues that form to get in are endless, especially on public holidays. To avoid them, we recommend discovering the museum first thing in the morning or last thing in the afternoon. There is also a faster line for tourists with the I Amsterdam City Card.

Not to be missed

Explore most of Vincent van Gogh’s works of art at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and learn about the painter’s tortured life and how his work marked the late nineteenth century.

• Van Gogh ticket + Canal cruise

If you prefer to go on your own accord, the museum offers brochures in English explaining a lot of his work and life.