Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam: Everything You Need to Know Before You Visit

The permanent collection is arranged chronologically across four floors, tracing Van Gogh's full career from his earliest work in the Netherlands to his death at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. Following the sequence as designed gives the collection its intended coherence: you watch the palette lighten, the brushwork loosen, and the emotional register intensify as the artist develops.

Floor 0 (ground level): Lobby and orientation The entrance floor has a shop, cloakroom, café, and orientation materials. Before ascending, the building's design itself is worth a moment: Rietveld's 1973 structure combines concrete, glass, and steel with a spaciousness that feels more generous than the building's footprint suggests. The exhibition wing behind, designed by Kurokawa and opened in 1999, connects via the underground passage and houses the temporary exhibitions.

Floor 1: The early work (Netherlands, 1880 to 1885) Van Gogh only began painting seriously at 27, after failing careers as an art dealer, a teacher, and a lay preacher. The dark, earthy canvases from his years in the Netherlands are the work of a man teaching himself to paint by doing it obsessively, every day, for hours. The highlight of this floor is The Potato Eaters (1885): a large, brooding canvas of five peasants at a table, eating by lamplight, their faces weathered and angular. Van Gogh considered this his first serious masterpiece and wrote about it extensively. In reproduction it looks severe. In front of the original, the gravity of it is impossible to ignore. Many visitors who came expecting Sunflowers find themselves stopped here instead.

Floor 2: Paris, letters, and drawings (1886 to 1888) Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886 and was immediately exposed to the Impressionists, the Japanese woodblock prints then circulating widely in France, and the Post-Impressionist experiments of Seurat, Signac, and Toulouse-Lautrec. The transformation in his palette is dramatic and immediate. This floor contains many of his self-portraits from the Paris years, including the celebrated Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (1887): a canvas of controlled intensity in which he applies paint with short diagonal strokes of contrasting colour to build a surface that almost vibrates. There are 35 self-portraits in the collection in total. He could not afford models, so he painted himself.

The second floor also holds the museum's extraordinary collection of letters, including those to Theo, to fellow artists, and to his mother and sister. These are displayed in contexts that illuminate the paintings on the same floor, and they transform the experience of seeing his work. Reading his own precise and often beautiful descriptions of why he made specific decisions, what he was trying to achieve, and where he felt he had failed makes the canvases feel inhabited in a way that wall text from curators rarely achieves.

Floor 3: Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers-sur-Oise (1888 to 1890) The top floor covers Van Gogh's move to the South of France in February 1888 and the remaining two and a half years of his life: the most famous, most productive, and most devastating period. This is where you find Sunflowers, The Bedroom (1888, showing his room in the Yellow House in Arles with its characteristic wide perspective and deliberately non-naturalistic colour), The Yellow House (1888, the building he rented in Arles and hoped to share with Gauguin in an artists' community), Wheatfield with Crows (1890, one of his last works, a churning sky above a wheat field with a path that leads nowhere), and Almond Blossom (1890).

Almond Blossom deserves specific mention. Van Gogh painted it to celebrate the birth of Theo's son, who was named after him: Vincent Willem van Gogh. The baby who would later become the driving force behind establishing this museum. The painting shows white and pale pink blossoms against a deep blue sky in a style strongly influenced by the Japanese prints Van Gogh had collected in Paris. It is probably his most immediately beautiful and most formally resolved single canvas, and it carries a biographical weight, a gift of hope for a child who would outlive his uncle by decades and preserve his legacy, that is impossible to separate from the visual experience.

The exhibition wing (Kurokawa building): The temporary exhibition programme at the Van Gogh Museum covers both Van Gogh and the wider context of his work: contemporaries who influenced him (Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Millet, Japonisme), artists who came after him and were shaped by his example (Expressionism, Fauvism), and thematic explorations of specific aspects of his practice. Past temporary exhibitions have included collaborations with David Hockney, a major Edvard Munch show, Etel Adnan, and several smaller artist-dialogue exhibitions. All temporary exhibitions are included in the standard €25 ticket, with no additional charges.