The museum will showcase at least 50 works, including The Bedroom, Garden of the Asylum and—of course—the museum’s own Sunflowers, as part of its bicentenary celebrations in 2024.
The National Gallery is to celebrate its 200-year anniversary since its founding in 1824 with a huge exhibition on Van Gogh. Revealed in The Art Newspaper, the show will focus on the artist’s time in Provence, France, where he produced his greatest work.
The exhibition is scheduled to run from September 2024 to January 2025 (admittedly this announcement is a very early one). There will be at least 50 works, mainly paintings, along with some drawings, making it the largest Van Gogh exhibition in the UK since the Royal Academy’s 2010 show, which attracted 411,000 visitors.
Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait as a Painter (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The National Gallery exhibition, provisionally entitled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, is to begin with the period when Van Gogh was in Arles. He arrived there from Paris in February 1888, seeking the powerful sunlight of the south of France. After initially staying in a small hotel, he later took a room above a café and then moved into the Yellow House.
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (August 1888) Credit: National Gallery, London
One of the National Gallery’s greatest, and permanent, treasures is the original version of the Sunflowers on a yellow background. This was painted in August 1888 to decorate the bedroom of Van Gogh’s friend, Gauguin. The exhibition will also tell the astonishing story of how the Sunflowers ended up in London.
