Private Van Gogh Museum Tour

Private Van Gogh Museum Tour

Vincent van Gogh’s entire career as an artist lasted just ten years. In that time his style changed so dramatically, and so quickly, that it can be hard to believe you’re looking at work by the same person. The museum is organised chronologically, which makes it the ideal place to follow that story from beginning to end and, because we also have access to the extraordinary volume of letters he wrote to his brother Theo, we know more about what he was thinking and feeling at each stage than we do about almost any other artist in history. That combination of the paintings and the letters is what makes a guided tour here genuinely different from just walking around on your own.

Vincent’s Life Before Art Most people don’t realise that Van Gogh didn’t start painting until his late twenties. Before that he worked as an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and briefly as a lay preacher. I’ll sketch out that background before we go in, because understanding where he came from makes everything that follows make much more sense.

The Dutch Period His early work is dark, earthy and heavily influenced by Rembrandt and the Dutch tradition of peasant painting. The Potato Eaters is the most famous work from this period and a deliberate statement of intent. It looks nothing like what came later.

Paris Moving to Paris in 1886 changed everything. He encountered the Impressionists, discovered Japanese woodblock prints, met Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat and Gauguin, and his palette transformed almost overnight. The contrast with the Dutch work, hanging just a few galleries away, is one of the most striking things in the museum.

Arles The intense, sun-saturated colours of the south of France, the famous bedroom paintings, the sunflowers, the self-portraits. Also the breakdown, the ear, the voluntary admission to the asylum at Saint-Rémy. His letters from this period are among the most revealing he ever wrote.

Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise The final rooms. The swirling skies, the large confident canvases, the sense of someone painting with enormous urgency. He died in Auvers in July 1890, two months after leaving the asylum. He was 37.

The Artists Who Influenced Him The museum is smart about context, it hangs works by Israels, Monet, Manet, Signac, Pissaro, Bernard, Gauguin and others alongside Van Gogh’s own work so you can see the conversations he was having with them directly. I’ll point these out and explain what he took from each one.

Techniques From the dark tonal work of the Dutch period to the impasto, the radiating brushstrokes, the swirling patterns of the later work, his technique was always in service of one overriding goal, which was to express emotion as directly as possible. I’ll show you what to look for up close.

One more thing worth knowing: I’ve put together a Van Gogh Museum slideshow with many of the paintings we look at together, which you can browse before or after the tour. There are ads between the slides which aren’t from me – apologies for those – but if you have an adblocker you won’t see them.