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 will range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. © Martin Bailey

New publication sheds fresh light on brothel scenes by Emile Bernard and Van Gogh

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum this week publishes a catalogue focused on Bernard‘s rarely seen drawings featuring prostitution and sexual allegories

The Van Gogh painting that was stolen—and recovered in an Ikea bag—goes on show

Research reveals that the artist began the work as a winter scene and transformed it into a spring landscape

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 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’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

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

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

Van Gogh’s last paintings go on show in Amsterdam and Paris

The two exhibitions are the first to highlight the artist’s productive final months in Auvers

Van Gogh's thwarted dream: a painting by the artist blocked from display in a French café

A plan to show the €75m “Garden at Auvers” in the village inn where the artist died has been halted at the last minute, although hopefully temporarily

How Van Gogh’s drawing skills were once trumped by a 16-year-old girl

Discovered: a sketch by a pastor’s daughter, who sat beside Van Gogh when they both depicted a woman peeling potatoes