Moments from Van Gogh Museum

The museum exists because Vincent's nephew and namesake, an engineer named Vincent Willem van Gogh, inherited several hundred paintings and drawings from his father Theo's widow and spent decades quietly turning them into a public trust rather than selling them off piecemeal. He donated the entire holding to the Dutch state in 1962 on the condition that a proper museum be built for it, which opened in 1973 in a building by Gerrit Rietveld, with a second wing by Kisho Kurokawa added in 1999. The result is the largest Van Gogh collection anywhere, roughly 200 paintings and 500 drawings, and because it is one family's holding rather than a collection assembled piece by piece at auction, you can walk it in order and watch a single decade of work transform in real time.

Start on the second floor and move chronologically: the murky, potato-brown Nuenen years give way almost violently to the color he found in Paris and then Arles, and by the time you reach the turbulence of Auvers-sur-Oise in the final rooms, the shift is visceral rather than academic. Book a timed ticket well in advance, the museum sells out days or weeks ahead in high season and there is no walk-up line to speak of. The letters displayed alongside the paintings are worth slowing down for too. Read a few in full rather than skimming; they are the closest thing to hearing him explain, in his own words, what he thought he was doing.