Once Every Forty Years: 88 Van Goghs in a Dutch Forest
Updated: 6 hours ago
For the first time since 1984, the Kröller-Müller Museum is hanging every Van Gogh painting it owns. All 88 of them, from 15 September 2026 to 3 January 2027, in an exhibition the museum has called, with Dutch economy, Van Gogh, All Our Paintings.
On an ordinary day, the Kröller-Müller shows around 35. That is already more Van Gogh than most people see in a lifetime. The rest live in the depot, or travel, often to Japan, where the museum lends generously. This autumn they all come home, and if you have ever wondered what a life's work looks like in a single building, this is the closest you will get.
I have a personal long history with this place. When I started Sapiens Travel the museum ended up on nearly every programme I designed, and in the years I guided most tours myself there were weeks when I drove into the Hoge Veluwe forest more than once. I know the pace of the rooms the way you know a walk you take often. I know which bench gets the light at eleven.
And our Storykeepers know it too. As it is one of the first places we take them when they join us, and because the museum has, over the years, become one of the institutions we work with most closely in the Netherlands. So when the news of this exhibition came, it felt like a friend telling you they are finally clearing out the attic.
Faith, hope and love
The curators have organised the 88 paintings around three words, faith, hope and love, and I find this a quietly brilliant decision. Before Van Gogh was a painter he tried to be a preacher. He gave his first sermon in 1876, in a small church near London, and the text he chose spoke of being born again to a life of faith, hope and charity. He failed at the pulpit. He failed with the miners of the Borinage, whom he tried to serve so literally that the church sent him away. Only then, in his late twenties, did he pick up a pencil in earnest. He painted for ten years and died at 37.
Walk through the exhibition with those three words in mind and the biography rearranges itself. The sermon never stopped. It changed medium. The Potato Eaters, with its lamp and its shared dish, is a painting about a family that has almost nothing and still sits down together. Sorrowing Old Man, painted in the asylum near Saint Rémy two months before his death, shows a man with his face in his fists, and Van Gogh titled it At Eternity's Gate, which tells you what he thought sat on the other side of despair. The Sower walks into a sun that fills half the sky. Terrace of a Café at Night gives a square in Arles more stars than it has ever had. He wanted his pictures to console people. The Kröller-Müller has simply taken him at his word.
What was not seen before
The regular hang is already the second largest Van Gogh collection in the world, after the family collection in Amsterdam. What this exhibition adds is the middle of the story, the studies, the second versions, the canvases that were never postcards.
The Old Tower at Nuenen, painted the year his father died, in the village where the tower itself was about to be demolished. L'Arlésienne, the portrait of Madame Ginoux, the café owner who sat for him and for Gauguin in the same week. Cypresses with Two Figures, from the last year, where the trees twist like flames and two small people walk underneath as if nothing were happening. And a whole room of the early Dutch work, the dark years, which most visitors skip on their way to the yellow and which, seen in full, make the yellow mean more.
Helene Kröller-Müller bought most of these between 1908 and 1929, when a good Van Gogh could still be had for a modest sum, and she bought with a thesis in mind, to show how painting travelled from realism to abstraction. All Our Paintings is the first chapter of that thesis, laid out at last without gaps.
How we do it
With an exclusive visit to a historical art bunker or a visit to an alpaca farm!
We begin in the sculpture garden while the paths are still empty, past Hepworth, Moore and the Dubuffet you climb into, so the group arrives at the doors at the speed the paintings need. Inside, we carry on where Van Gogh stops, through Seurat and Picasso to Mondrian and De Stijl, the story of how the modern eye was made.
Then the bunker. In 1940 the whole collection went into a concrete shelter in the forest on handcarts and stayed there until the war was over. It is a small, cold room, and the reason there is anything to hang this autumn at all. We visit it privately, after the galleries.
Lunch is where we keep our surprises, including a farm where you leave a coin in a box and walk off with a punnet of strawberries. The afternoon goes to an alpaca farm/cafe on the edge of the Veluwe or to a castle, Doorwerth, Rosendael or Cannenburch.
We run full days from Amsterdam and The Hague and fold the museum into our Hanseatic itineraries along the IJssel. Entry is timed, and we book early. If you want a day around 88 Van Goghs in the woods for your clients, tell us who is travelling and when. It happens once every forty years, and I would rather you did not wait for the next one.
Van Gogh, All Our Paintings, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. 15 September 2026 to 3 January 2027.
