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

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

The three top Van Gogh exhibitions of the year all open this May

Shows in Amsterdam, Chicago and New York break new ground, presenting the artist’s finest work done on the outskirts of Paris and in Provence

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

How Van Gogh’s 'Terrace of a Café at Night'—with its starry sky—was inspired by a friend’s painting

The work’s dramatic colour contrast echoes a Parisian street scene by Louis Anquetin, now on show at London’s National Gallery

Van Gogh stars in 'After Impressionism' show at London's National Gallery

Loans include four rarely seen paintings from private collections, with a major rediscovery

Half of Van Gogh’s most expensive paintings have sold to Chinese collectors

The burgeoning growth of the East Asian market pushes up prices for the artist’s work

Van Gogh painted his lyrical Almond Blossom to herald the coming of spring

This picture was given to hang above his two-week-old nephew’s crib—and later survived raucous pillow fights

The Van Gogh phenomenon: our top ten most popular stories on the artist

After 200 posts of the "Adventures with Van Gogh" blog, an intriguing look back at the most-read posts

Did Vincent van Gogh get Gordina pregnant? Christie’s is selling her portrait

Coming up for auction on 28 February for £1m-£2m, the painting has been hidden in a private collection for 120 years

Hidden in a London attic, I discovered a Bible inscribed by Van Gogh

Vincent and his young English friend Harry Gladwell read the book cover-to-cover in their Paris lodgings—possibly praying to avoid the temptations of Montmartre

Was Van Gogh's olive grove landscape another Nazi-era 'forced sale'?

We uncover the tangled tale of the painting controversially sold off by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 and now in an Athens museum

I met the oldest woman in the world—who shared her memories of Van Gogh in Arles

Madame Jeanne Calment, who lived to be 122, recalled meeting the artist as a child

Van Gogh's Tokyo Sunflowers: Was it a Nazi forced sale? And is the painting now worth $250m?

Bought for a Japanese museum in 1987, the masterpiece has just been claimed by the heirs of a Jewish Berlin banker

Van Gogh in 2022: record prices, top shows and exciting discoveries

Plus, the best books on Vincent and the artist's booming immersive experiences

Why is Van Gogh under attack?

Vincent’s best-loved paintings are singled out by climate protestors

a blog by Martin Bailey