Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam owes its name to the painter of the same name, of whom it holds the largest collection of works in the world.

It consists of only two buildings: the main one, opened in 1973 and designed by the Dutch architect and craftsman Gerrit Rietveld, and the so-called new wing, whose works were completed in 1999 under the careful guidance of Kisho Kurokawa.

In 2002 two great works by the famous artist were stolen from the gallery, a congregation leaving the Reformed Church of Nuenen from 1855 and the beach of Scheveningen before a storm from 1882.

The paintings were found only 14 years later, in September 2016, after a search by the Guardia di Finanza of a group of drug traffickers doing business with the Camorra.
Today the paintings have an inestimable value.

The artistic collection of this extraordinary Dutch museum features the works of Vincent Van Gogh from every phase of his life, starting from childhood and adolescence, passing through his changing emotional states and arriving up to his death.
Among these we can mention: The Potato Eaters, one of the various versions of the famous Sunflowers and The Bedroom of Vincent in Arles.

This painting is defined by the artist himself as the best ever, because it recalls the peasant and rural life of his childhood and comes after the series of peasant heads that helped him refine his technique.

The work portrays a rather poor dwelling in Nuenen illuminated by a dim light, with at the center a family of peasants who, after spending the day in the fields, relax around a table to consume their evening meal.
Van Gogh highlights the calloused and knotty hands that take the potatoes to eat them, the same hands that harvested them from the ground.

This work from 1888 is absolutely one of the artist’s most well-known, an oil on canvas measuring 72×90 cm.
The subject is Van Gogh’s bedroom in the so-called yellow house in Arles, with the famous wooden bed at the side of the room, a coat rack where the well-known straw hat with which the artist portrayed himself a year earlier stands out, and an open window, as if to let the painting breathe.

Extremely important are the two empty wicker chairs, one near the bed and one against the wall, an evident metaphor for the absence of his friend Gauguin and the woman of his life, never actually met.

Sunflowers are a series of oil paintings created between 1888 and 1889, one of the painter’s favorite and most beloved subjects.

The painting shows this characteristic flower in various stages of blooming, with the complex shapes of the stems and petals, as if to demonstrate great torment.
These paintings had a deliberately revolutionary effect thanks to the innovative use of cadmium yellow, particularly loved by Van Gogh.
The painter’s signature is found on the vase, and like other great masters, he used only his first name, Vincent.

The Amsterdam gallery linked to the life and works of this great artist is absolutely unique in the world.