In the UK, kids go to school for approximately the same amount of time as kids in Canada, but the year is broken up a bit differently. Schools here start late August/early September, and then in the middle of the semester, they have what's known as half-term break. Most schools have a 1-week break, but my school, for whatever reason, had 2. I definitely wasn't complaining about that! However, since my husband couldn't take both weeks off from work, I decided to do some things in one of the weeks that he wasn't necessarily interested in. In this instance, it was to visit The Van Gogh Museum, somewhere he had already been before, and somewhere we didn't get to go to when we went to the Continent in the spring.
It had been my dream for about 30 years now to visit this museum. As van Gogh is my favourite artist, I've wanted to go to the place that houses the largest collection of his works so that I could just enjoy them in real life and look as closely as possible to see his technique. As I mentioned above, I had wanted to visit there in the spring, but I didn't know that you should book tickets at least a couple of weeks in advance because I discovered you can't just book when you get there or just show up since the museum limits how many people can visit, and it was fully booked when I tried to get tickets once we had arrived in the city. My dream finally came through during half-term.
I was so excited just to be there, to see a row of van Gogh's self portraits, for example, and to see some of his more famous paintings, like "The Potato Eaters" and one of his "Sunflowers in a Vase." The only thing I wished they had more of in the museum was seats because I would have really loved to just sit and contemplate more, soak in the air of the place filled with the paintings of my favourite artist. What few seats they had were often full, but toward the end, I managed to find space in front of "Crows in a Wheat Field," one of my favourites of his paintings, and I just closed my eyes and felt so grateful to get to be there, and I pictured him painting it and tried to imagine how he might have felt at the time, given that it's one of the last paintings he did before his took his own life. I thought about how his works might inspire my own art, how it already has. I also thought about his application and celebration of light in the darkness. It was such a wonderful experience to be there. I did snap a few photos of the famous ones, though not all, and those ones had such crowds around them. But I have favourite paintings of his that are not among the more well-known ones, including portraits of Dr Gachet and Armand Roulin (sadly, not in the museum's collection), and his Japanese and Chinoiseries inspired paintings, and various landscapes and floral paintings. I also enjoyed that they had some of the artefacts that van Gogh owned and used, one of which was some tubes of paint and his pallet. It was interesting to see that the tubes of paint they make today largely haven't changed in design since the late 1800s. One thing I learned was that many of van Gogh's paintings have changed colour over time. Some of the pigments used in certain colours were experimental back in the day, and they didn't retain their colour over time. So the painting with the irises, we all thought they were blue irises, a plausible enough assumption, given that it is a common colour for irises, but the original was actually much more purple. The museum showed a photo of the side of the painting that had been protected by the frame all these years, and the original colour was shown to be purple, not blue, so it makes you wonder how much more stunning some of the paintings could have been back in the day.
The only disappointment was that in the museum map, there was supposed to be a section on van Gogh's family life, including some of the letters he wrote to this brother Theo. Apparently most of those letters have survived, and the museum holds over half of them. but when I went to find the section, it had been replaced with a section on the Gasworks, where van Gogh did this one painting to document industrialisation, and then the rest was talking about the effect of industrialisation, newspaper drawings of factories, and a collection of large gasworks inspired paintings but some contemporary artist. I just felt like they should have put that somewhere else. If I'm coming to The Van Gogh Museum, it's not to see other people's stuff. But I wasn't going to let it ruin my experience. The bottom line is that I finally got to visit a place I had longed to go to, and I'm just so grateful for that.
The special exhibits section did feature another artist--though that's where I would expect to see other artists rather than what I mentioned earlier with the gasworks--which was Gustav Klimt. Historically, I hadn't been such a huge fan of his work, but I discovered that my ticket covered the admission for the exhibit, so I decided I should make use of the price I paid to fully experience all the sections of the museum. But I was really glad I did view this exhibit. I discovered that, while I still am not a fan of all of his works, the ones in the more Art Nouveau style, the fact that Klimt was inspired by light and by the Impressionists caused him to create some very beautiful works and that he was also a highly talented portrait artist. One of the portraits he did looks so real that it seems to be a modern photograph, yet he painted it in the early 1900s! I'm always happy when I have experiences that cause me to change my opinion on something or someone. In this case, I gained an appreciation for an artist that I would otherwise have continued to ignore.
Overall, it was an experience that met my expectations. The museum was indeed smaller than I imagined it would be, but that was actually a good thing. I had been afraid that it would be like some of the larger museums I've been to where you need all day and/or multiple visits to see everything, and given that I had a limited amount of time, I ended up being able to see the entire collection and even take my time doing so to really savour it, rather than motor past everything just to say I saw it and I was there. I'd given myself 4 hours to see the museum and was able to see it all in half the time, so I was actually happy about that. I must admit that I gave in an bought one of those van Gogh umbrellas at the gift shop. I actually needed a new one, and these ones were actually quite good quality and even larger than some of the ones you find in other tourist traps. They really do capitalise a little too much on what they sell though. Like there were these little cans of extra virgin olive oil (pictured)--not even reusable cans. Like why am I going to buy something like that, especially when I can't even use the can once it's done? It just made me shake my head, and it reminded me of the "holy hand sanitiser" I saw at the cathedral in Edinburgh. The things people come up with in tourist merchandise! Anyway, that was a wonderful experience for me, and I continue to feel so happy to have finally visited.
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