The Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is perhaps the most popular museum found in the Amsterdam Museumplein. Almost every piece of art ever created by Van Gogh can be found here, including most of his lesser known works and even some personal sketches and drawings. Prints and correspondence, mostly in the form of letters, are also housed at the museum. A trip to the Vincent Van Gogh Museum is an absolute must for anyone traveling to the Netherlands.

A trip to the Van Gogh Museum will reveal more than 200 paintings and more than 500 pieces of sketchwork and correspondence. All of the pieces are displayed in chronological order, allowing viewers to track the artists ten year painting career through the displayed work. The work is also grouped into the seven periods and places of residences Van Gogh experienced.

One of the most remarkable such sections of the Vincent Van Gogh Museum is the final section, with paintings created by Van Gogh when he was living in the south of France. This final section includes paintings that are considered by many art historians to be the best of van Gogh’s work, and contains one of modern art’s most famous paintings, Still Life Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers. Paintings that follow seem to be leading up to the distress the artist was feeling at the time that eventually led to his death.

Earlier sections of the Vincent Van Gogh Museum include the group of paintings created in Provence. The Wheatfield with a Reaper and other bright paintings were created during this period and are also found in the Van Gogh Museum. The time that Van Gogh spent in Paris defined much of his most famous style and greatly influenced the colors his used and his method of painting.

Tourist should plan to set aside about 2-4 hours for touring the Van Gogh Museum. One recent addition to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is a wing dedicated to housing the work of Van Gogh and his contemporaries. Temporary exhibits can be seen in this section of the museum. Travelers will find works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Monet on permanent display at the museum. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is open Saturday through Thursday from 10am to 6pm, and on Fridays from 10am to 10pm. Lines for the museum can be quite long on the weekends, so if you can, try and hit up the museum on a weekday morning or afternoon.