The Starry Night Is Not In Amsterdam: What To Know Before Visiting The Van Gogh Museum

(MENAFN- USA Art News) You booked the two o'clock slot for Friday, and you told me the one painting you had to see was The Starry Night. It is in New York. It hangs at the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired it through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange). I am not saying this to be difficult. I am saying it because it is the most useful thing to know before visiting the Van Gogh Museum, which is that the collection on Museumplein is not a selection of the greatest hits. It is one household's inheritance. There is a picture in that building that will do for you what you wanted The Starry Night to do, and I will come to it, but you have to understand the inheritance first or you will walk past it.

The collection is an inheritance, not a purchase

Vincent van Gogh died in July 1890. His brother Theo died on 25 January 1891, and the museum's own account of it is precise about the interval and the cause: six months after Vincent's death, of the effects of syphilis.

Theo's widow was Jo van Gogh-Bonger, and the baby on her lap in that photograph is their son, Vincent Willem. The museum is blunt about the scale of what landed on the two of them: they suddenly became the owners of hundreds of Vincent van Gogh's paintings, drawings and letters. Jo van Gogh-Bonger did not sit on them. The museum records that she sold some of the works, loaned others out for exhibitions, and published Vincent's letters to Theo, and that the reputation you are buying a ticket to would not exist without her.

She died on 2 September 1925, the date the museum records in the provenance line on its own collection pages, though its story pages give only the year. Responsibility passed to her son, who had trained as a mechanical engineer and is still called the engineer in the museum's own texts, to keep the two Vincents apart. He made one decision that explains the building you are walking into. He decided that nothing more would be sold. For years afterwards, as the museum tells it, works including Almond Blossom and Sunflowers simply hung on the walls of his house in Laren.

Then the war. When the German army invaded in May 1940 most of the collection was moved into an underground vault in the dunes near Castricum and sat there until it was over. The engineer's eldest son, Theo, joined the resistance. He was arrested near the end of the war and executed.

In 1962 the engineer concluded an agreement with the Dutch state. He transferred the collection, which the museum counts as over 200 paintings, five hundred drawings, eight hundred letters and other art the family had gathered over the years, to the newly established Vincent van Gogh Foundation. In return the state committed to build a museum and to maintain it, treating the collection, in the phrase the museum quotes from the agreement,“as if it were state property”. The doors opened on 2 June 1973.

What the family let go, and what it never did

You will have heard that Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. The museum says that is wrong, on its own frequently-asked-questions page: we do not know exactly how many he sold, but in any case it was more than a couple. His uncle Cor, an art dealer, commissioned nineteen cityscapes of The Hague. He sold a painting to the Paris paint dealer Julien Tanguy. Theo sold another to a gallery in London. The Red Vineyard, painted in 1888, was bought by Anna Boch, the sister of his friend Eugène Boch, and is now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

The Red Vineyard went out into the world and stayed out. That is the sorting principle behind the walls you are about to look at: the pictures that found a buyer went wherever buyers were, and a great many of the pictures that did not are in one building in Amsterdam. Even The Starry Night obeys it. Jo van Gogh-Bonger sold it to Georgette van Stolk in Rotterdam, and it reached MoMA in 1941.

The Sunflowers you will queue for is a second thought in the same way. The museum's catalogue entry says Van Gogh painted five large canvases of sunflowers in a vase, in Arles, in 1888 and 1889, and that the Amsterdam picture, dated January 1889, is one of two loose copies he made later.

The practical part of visiting the Van Gogh Museum

You have the ticket already. The rest of this the museum spreads across several separate pages, and three of them disagree.

Tickets

Twenty-five euros for an adult. Under-18s free, and they still need a ticket. Students sixteen euros on production of a card or proof of enrolment from an institution in the EU or EEA. Museumkaart free. The museum states that tickets are sold online only and that every visitor needs a ticket with a start time, which means there is no counter to walk up to on the day. If your admission is free through a card, you still have to reserve a slot.

Getting there

Museumplein 6, 1071 DJ Amsterdam. Trams 2, 5 and 24 stop at Museumplein. The address to walk to is the square, not the street: the museum says its main entrance is on Museumplein, while the building holding the paintings is addressed from Paulus Potterstraat round the back.

Opening hours

Through September 2026 the museum opens daily at 9 in the morning and closes at 6, with Fridays running until 9 at night, except 25 September. Check which Friday you have booked before you plan an evening. November and December mostly close at 5 rather than 6, and October has a couple of 5 o'clock days in the middle of the month.

How long it takes

The museum's answer, on its visitor FAQ, is two to three hours on average, and it says that figure covers the permanent collection, the temporary exhibition, and time in the cafe and the shop. So your two hours is less looking than it sounds.

The audio desk

The museum rents an audio tour for 3.75 euros, 2 euros for children aged 13 to 17, free for children up to 12. You add it when you book. Then you go and find it, and this is where the museum's own pages stop agreeing with each other.

The audio tour page says to collect it from the Audio Desk downstairs in the Atrium. The visitor FAQ sends you to the Information Desk. Both put it in the Atrium, so you will get there. A third page disagrees about what you are collecting: the audio tour page says fourteen languages and then lists fourteen, the ticket page says twelve. Twelve is the stale number. The museum's own press release of 17 December 2025 said Turkish and Arabic were being added in early 2026, which takes it to fourteen, and one page got the edit. Chiaro is the other option, and what recommends it in this particular building is narrow: there is no desk to be wrong about.

Which building is which

The round drum is the exhibition wing Kisho Kurokawa designed, which opened in 1999. The glass structure beside it is the main entrance, opened to the public on 5 September 2015; it added 800 square metres and cost 20 million euros, and the museum says it financed the work largely itself, out of its own resources and donations. The permanent collection is in neither of them. It is in the Rietveld building, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1963 and 1964 and opened in 1973 - the grey and white block behind the glass, the one with the banner on it, which the museum addresses from Paulus Potterstraat on its far side.

## What is actually on the walls

Here the inheritance stops being a family story and turns into a floor plan.

The Van Goghs are the reason you came: The Potato Eaters, The Bedroom, Sunflowers, and rooms of drawings and letters. But a great deal of what is in that building is not by him. The museum holds hundreds of Japanese prints because Vincent collected them himself, and it says most of that collection ended up here. It holds the Bonger Collection, gathered by Andries Bonger, who was Jo van Gogh-Bonger's brother and, in the museum's phrase, a good friend of the brothers Theo and Vincent; about half of what he assembled reached the museum, Odilon Redon and Émile Bernard included. It holds Gauguin, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet.

Not all of it is inheritance, and the museum is straightforward about which parts are not. Andries Bonger's Redons were sold by his heirs to the Dutch state in 1996 and placed here, which is why their credit line reads Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (State of the Netherlands). The museum's French prints from the end of the century were bought too: 800 of them from a German private collection in 2000, and it is still buying. So the estate is the core of the place rather than the whole of it.

What the two kinds have in common is that a highlights tour has no room for either. Japanese prints owned by the painter himself are a stranger thing to stand in front of, when they are out, than another vase of flowers; the museum says that due to their sensitivity to light the prints rarely go on display. This is the argument for a guide that answers whatever you point it at rather than one that answers a fixed list of stops. A free audio guide to five of the paintings plays in a browser with the transcript printed under each recording, which is a way of arriving already briefed on the obvious ones.

The picture I would give you twenty minutes for

Almond Blossom, painted at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in February 1890. Van Gogh made it as a present for Theo and Jo, whose son had just been born. Theo had written to tell him the news:“As we told you, we'll name him after you, and I'm making the wish that he may be as determined and as courageous as you.” The museum says it was this work above all that stayed closest to the family. The baby it was painted for is the engineer, and the engineer is the reason there is a museum.

This is the one I promised you. It does the thing you wanted The Starry Night to do - a whole canvas given over to sky, and something dark and articulate drawn across it - and it does it in a colour nobody expects and at the exact moment the family's fortunes turned. Give it twenty minutes. Give Sunflowers two. You may well think that is sentimental. There is a decent argument that Sunflowers is the better painting. I would still stand in front of the almond tree, because the whole institution grew out of it.

An audio tour of five paintings here comes to about ten and a half minutes altogether, which is the right size for what it is. It is not a substitute for two hours in the building. It is a way of turning up with the argument already in your head, so the twenty minutes goes on looking rather than on reading a label.

Two things undercut any list of stops, ours included. This museum lends its own masterpieces to its own temporary exhibitions, so a painting can move to another wing without leaving the building; Almond Blossom spent this summer in a temporary show elsewhere in the building. And our five stops end on a painting that may not be on the wall at all.

The painting you may not see

Wheatfield with Crows, Auvers-sur-Oise, July 1890, 50.5 by 103 centimetres. As I write this, the museum's own catalogue page for it says the painting is undergoing conservation treatment and is therefore not on display, while the status flag at the top of that same page still says it is on view. I cannot resolve that from here and neither can you. Ask at the desk.

Read the page anyway, because the museum uses it to take down the story everybody arrives carrying. It is often claimed, the entry says, that this was his very last work, and that the menacing sky and the crows and the dead-end path point at the end of his life. That is a persistent myth. He made several other works after it.

The contract the state signed

The 1962 agreement bound the Dutch state to keep this museum going, and in 2026 that obligation is in dispute. Nobody at the ticket desk will mention it, and it will be going on while you are inside. Emilie Gordenker, the director of the Van Gogh Museum, told the New York Times the museum could be forced to close unless the culture ministry raised its annual subsidy, defended by the government at 8.5 million euros, by another 2.5 million; a renovation planned from 2028 has been costed at 104 million. The Art Newspaper reported on 5 May 2026 that the two sides had gone into mediation, that the court had granted an adjournment for an indefinite period, and that the culture minister, Rianne Letschert, confirmed the talks would stay confidential.

The engineer saw the shape of this coming. He deliberately built the 1962 arrangement so that a foundation owned the pictures and the state only guaranteed the housing, and the museum quotes his reason for it in his own words:“you never know what politics or the government will do in the future”.

Image credits

– Jo Bonger and son Vincent Willem van Gogh 1890.jpg - Raoul Saisset, public domain.

– Van Gogh Museum, Kurokawa wing.jpg - Sebastian Koppehel, CC BY 4.0.

– Amandelbloesem – s0176V1962 – Van Gogh Museum.jpg - Vincent van Gogh, public domain.

– Korenveld met kraaien – s0149V1962 – Van Gogh Museum.jpg - Vincent van Gogh, public domain.

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