Adventures with Van Gogh

Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. © Martin Bailey

A Dutch museum wants to buy a Van Gogh painting from an English collector

The portrait of Gordina, whom Vincent was accused of getting pregnant, is worth around £5m

Van Gogh and Gauguin’s little cat

The playful creature—painted while the artists were living in the Yellow House—has crept out of hiding after more than 100 years

Van Gogh 2024 highlights: London’s National Gallery takes the lead

There will be other exhibitions in Italy, France, the Netherlands and Taiwan—plus a topical book and a plethora of immersive experiences

Van Gogh in 2023: the best-ever series of exhibitions

Other highlights include the dramatic recovery of a stolen painting and an astonishing donation

When Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ was bought by the National Gallery it was snubbed as one of its top 100 acquisitions of the decade

Omitted from the 1920s book, next September the masterpiece will star in a London blockbuster on Vincent’s art of Provence

A stolen Van Gogh drawing recovered outside a public lavatory 20 years ago goes on show

The Whitworth's watercolour will be a highlight at the Royal Academy’s exhibition

Van Gogh’s 'Night Café': a haunt of prowlers, not a brothel

Vincent felt that the café he painted was where you could “ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes”

How a fake Van Gogh encouraged Barbra Streisand to buy the real thing

The star's autobiography reveals her admiration for a “self-portrait” owned by a Hollywood producer

Van Gogh exhibitions coming up in 2024, a blockbuster and a surprise

London’s National Gallery will top the bill, with a spectacular display of paintings from Provence

Van Gogh’s sunflowers blossom in Japan

The masterpiece is celebrated in a show at Tokyo’s Sompo Museum

Where did Van Gogh shoot himself?

It may have been near the inn where he stayed—not in a more distant wheatfield

Van Gogh paints by the River Seine, a stepping stone to Provence

A revelatory exhibition in Amsterdam on Vincent’s landscapes from the outskirts of Paris—along with those of his avant-garde colleagues

Experience Van Gogh’s final weeks—through a blockbuster exhibition in Paris

After seeing the Musée d’Orsay show, continue on to Auvers, to enter the room where Vincent lived and died

Van Gogh would have loved to see the National Gallery’s exhibition on Hals

We spotlight eight paintings in the London show that Vincent singled out for special praise

Revealed: Van Gogh’s unknown period, exploring the landscape of the remote north

The first exhibition on Vincent’s visit to Drenthe, where art consoled him after a failed love affair

Recovering the stolen Van Gogh: the museum director recalls the emotional moment

Seized in a violent raid in 2020, returned in a blue Ikea bag—now being bought back from the insurer

Brighter than a thousand suns: atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer and his three Van Goghs

The awesome nuclear test explosion at the heart of the new film seems prefigured by Vincent’s sunrise

Step inside Van Gogh’s London bedroom

It's 150 years since Vincent moved to Brixton, where he fell in love

What paintings did Van Gogh hang above his bed?

“Pictures within pictures” reveal more about life in the Yellow House

How Van Gogh inspired his artist friends to exchange self-portraits

But Vincent was then shocked when Paul Gauguin’s painting arrived at the Yellow House

Ten surprises about Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’

Vincent and his brother Theo once considered the painting a failure—and it only got its name in the 1920s

Van Gogh’s astonishingly bold painting of the church at Auvers, now on show in Amsterdam

The picture exudes spirituality, but after the artist shot himself, its priest refused to help bury him

Why is Van Gogh so popular?

An in-depth interview with the director of the Van Gogh Museum, Emilie Gordenker, on its 50th anniversary

Inspired by the Seine: an ambitious exhibition with Van Gogh’s Parisian landscapes opens in Chicago

Only one photograph of Vincent as an adult survives, drinking at a riverside café—but he turns his back on the camera