Rembrandt may be all over Amsterdam (see last episode!), but so is Vincent Van Gogh and he has a museum all to himself! This episode is all about him: some biographical details, plus an introduction to the Van Gogh Museum and to the best-known paintings you will see there. We finish with a brief mention of three other places to visit if Amsterdam’s modern art scene interests you. As ever, there is much more detail on the podcast.
Van Gogh’s early life
Vincent, born in 1853, first became interested in art when, aged 16, he went to work for an art dealer in The Hague and began collecting prints and reproductions. After a transfer to London, which he did not like, he moved to Amsterdam to study theology. Although he was there for less than two years and was not happy there either, he left this painterly description of it: ‘Twilight is falling … that little avenue of poplars and their slender forms and thin branches stand out so delicately against the grey evening sky ….. in the distance the masts of the ships in the dock can be seen … and just now here and there the lamps are being lit.’
By his mid-twenties, working as a lay-preacher in an industrial district in Belgium, he began to take a serious interest in art, visiting galleries, writing lists of his favourite painters, teaching himself drawing, obsessively copying old prints and reading books on anatomy and perspective. In 1880, aged 27, he moved to Brussels to take lessons at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1883 he wrote to his brother Theo that ‘My plan for life is to make paintings and drawings, as many and as well as I can’ and in 1885 he completed the first of his paintings which was to become very well known, The Potato Eaters.
Van Gogh in Paris
In 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris and was soon living in Montmartre and mixing with the artists who worked and gathered in the cafes there, including Gauguin, Pissarro and Toulouse-Lautrec. It was his introduction to impressionism, which he found ‘careless, ugly, badly painted’ at first. But soon he began to admire the bright colours and loose brushstrokes of the new trend and to think of Dutch painting as old-fashioned by comparison. In Paris he painted many self-portraits and still lifes in bright colours, along with scenes from the cafes, parks and streets of Montmartre. The two years he spent in Paris were key to his development as an artist.
van gogh in the south of france
In 1888 he moved to Arles, hoping to establish an artistic retreat and was immediately struck by the bright light and shimmering colours he found there. His paintings – of orchards in bloom, wheatfields, olive groves and sunflowers – grew brighter and, as the guidebook to the Van Gogh Museum puts it, ‘In Arles, his painting and drawing style reached full maturity; a personal, expressive manner of painting, with dashes of thick paint, often somewhat roughly and jaggedly applied, and sometimes using swirling lines. He moved his brush across the canvas freely and dynamically, in a way that was powerful and never repetitive’. He developed what Gauguin described as an ‘essential Vincent style’.
But it was also in Arles that his life fell apart. He neglected his health, drank heavily and argued endlessly with his friend Paul Gauguin who came to live and work with him there. After one bitter confrontation, Van Gogh cut off most of his own left ear and was taken to a psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy where he spent the next year painting intensely, mainly scenes he could see from his window. A year later, he discharged himself and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris where he painted feverishly, completing 70 works in as many days. But one hot July afternoon in 1890 he took a gun out into the fields and shot himself, dying 2 days later. He was buried in Auvers.
the van gogh museum
At the time of his death, Vincent had sold only one painting, but his family stewarded his work – there is much more detail on this on the podcast – and gradually his reputation grew. In the 1960s the Dutch government commissioned the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which today holds the world’s largest collection of his paintings (about 200) and drawings (about 500), along with a major collection of his letters. Among the many highlights, look out for the following:
Lots of self portraits, described as all recognisable as Vincent, yet different each time’ and as ‘not meant to show what he was like, but exercises in colour, brushwork and facial expression.’ Some show him applying the ideas of the Pointillists, yet in his own bold style.
The Potato Eaters is an early work aimed at showing the dignity of peasant life and paying tribute to the hard toil of those who tilled the land. Van Gogh said he had painted it ‘in something like the colour of a really dusty potato’ and wanted it to smell of ‘bacon, smoke and potato steam.’ He was pleased with it, although his brother Theo found it gloomy and feared it would not sell.
The Montmartre paintings include Boulevard de Clichy, featuring a scene close to where he lived in Paris and View from Theo’s Appartment in which he painted the surrounding apartment blocks in Pointillist style using tiny dots of colour.
Among his paintings from his time in Arles are:
The Harvest in which Van Gogh combined the azure blue of the sky with the yellows and greens of a southern French wheatfield on a stifling summer’s day.
The Yellow House (in Arles) abut which he wrote ‘My house here is painted outside in the yellow of fresh butter, with garish green shutters, and it’s in the full sun on the square, where there’s a green garden of plane trees, oleanders, acacias. ….. and the intense blue sky above. Inside I can live and breathe and think and paint.’
The Bedroom at Arles which is from inside the house at Arles, a simple room with splashes of bright colour about which he wrote ‘When I saw my canvases again after my illness, what seemed to me the best was the bedroom.’
Sunflowers. He painted a total of five large canvasses showing sunflowers in a vase using, as he put it, ‘three shades of yellow and nothing else’.
Almond Blossom is a work showing branches of blossom against a blue sky, celebrating new life and completed just after the birth of his brother Theo’s baby son, named Vincent after him. The work became a family heirloom.
Wheat Field with Crows is an unsettling work, painted in the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. It depicts a windswept wheatfield under a sky filled with crows, which Vincent had explained to Theo he used as a symbol of death. Some have claimed this was his last ever painting, but it is now thought that he was working on Tree Roots just before he died.
Look out too for paintings by other artists connected to Van Gogh for example by artists he admired (Jean-François Millet’s Vineyard Labourer and the rural landscape of Charles-François Daubigny’s October. There are some impressionist works here too, such as Pissarro’s Haymaking, along with some of the Japanese prints he admired and used as inspiration. Next to one, you can see Van Gogh’s version of it, Flowering Plum Orchard.
Let’s give the last word to AI, which summed up Vincent Van Gogh’s legacy as follows: ‘multifaceted, encompassing his enduring artistic influence, the romanticized myth of the “tortured artist,” and the enduring popularity of his work. While not widely recognized during his lifetime, his distinctive style, characterized by bold colours and expressive brushwork, profoundly impacted subsequent art movements like Expressionism and Fauvism.’
3 more museums to look out for
The Stedelijk Museum, just opposite the Van Gogh Museum, houses a collection of modern and contemporary art, displayed in three main sections: 1880-1950, 1950-80 and 1980–present.
NDSM LOODS is housed in a former shipyard, now home to a vibrant artistic community where you can watch over 250 artists at work and attend events as varied as art displays, music events, dance parties and photoshoots.
STRAAT is the world’s largest museum for graffiti and street art, also housed in a former warehouse. Here you can peruse up to 150 finished works, go on a guided tour or take part in various hands-on graffiti workshops.
Listen to the podcast
reading suggestions
Van Gogh The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh The Complete Paintings by Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger
links for this post
Van Gogh Museum
Stedelijk Museum
NDSM Loods
Straat Museum
Previous Episode Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Rijksmuseum
Next Episode coming very soon.
Last Updated on August 8, 2025 by Marian Jones
