Moments from Kröller-Müller Museum

Helene Kröller-Müller was one of the first women anywhere to assemble a major modern art collection on her own judgment, buying Van Goghs in the early 1900s when most of the art establishment still considered him a curiosity rather than a master. Her holding, some ninety Van Gogh paintings and nearly two hundred drawings, second in scale only to the Van Gogh Museum itself, now sits inside the Hoge Veluwe National Park in a 1938 building designed by Henry van de Velde, surrounded by one of Europe's largest sculpture gardens, works by Rodin, Moore, and Dubuffet scattered across heath and forest.

Getting there is unusual by museum standards: you enter the national park by car or bus and then take one of the free white bicycles scattered at stations throughout the reserve to actually reach the museum, a ride through heathland and pine forest that most visitors remember as vividly as the collection itself. Budget a full day, not just for the museum but for the park and sculpture garden around it, and check the weather, the outdoor sculptures are the point of a visit here as much as the paintings indoors. Wear shoes suited to a bike ride and a walk through open parkland, this is not a museum you visit in the clothes you'd wear to the Rijksmuseum.