Adventures with Van Gogh

Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories will range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. © Martin Bailey

How a fake Van Gogh encouraged Barbra Streisand to buy the real thing

The star's autobiography reveals her admiration for a “self-portrait” owned by a Hollywood producer

Van Gogh’s sunflowers blossom in Japan

The masterpiece is celebrated in a show at Tokyo’s Sompo Museum

Where did Van Gogh shoot himself?

It may have been near the inn where he stayed—not in a more distant wheatfield

Van Gogh paints by the River Seine, a stepping stone to Provence

A revelatory exhibition in Amsterdam on Vincent’s landscapes from the outskirts of Paris—along with those of his avant-garde colleagues

Experience Van Gogh’s final weeks—through a blockbuster exhibition in Paris

After seeing the Musée d’Orsay show, continue on to Auvers, to enter the room where Vincent lived and died

Van Gogh would have loved to see the National Gallery’s exhibition on Hals

We spotlight eight paintings in the London show that Vincent singled out for special praise

Revealed: Van Gogh’s unknown period, exploring the landscape of the remote north

The first exhibition on Vincent’s visit to Drenthe, where art consoled him after a failed love affair

Recovering the stolen Van Gogh: the museum director recalls the emotional moment

Seized in a violent raid in 2020, returned in a blue Ikea bag—now being bought back from the insurer

Brighter than a thousand suns: atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer and his three Van Goghs

The awesome nuclear test explosion at the heart of the new film seems prefigured by Vincent’s sunrise

What paintings did Van Gogh hang above his bed?

“Pictures within pictures” reveal more about life in the Yellow House

How Van Gogh inspired his artist friends to exchange self-portraits

But Vincent was then shocked when Paul Gauguin’s painting arrived at the Yellow House

Inspired by the Seine: an ambitious exhibition with Van Gogh’s Parisian landscapes opens in Chicago

Only one photograph of Vincent as an adult survives, drinking at a riverside café—but he turns his back on the camera

Van Gogh’s last paintings go on show in Amsterdam and Paris

The two exhibitions are the first to highlight the artist’s productive final months in Auvers

Van Gogh's thwarted dream: a painting by the artist blocked from display in a French café

A plan to show the €75m “Garden at Auvers” in the village inn where the artist died has been halted at the last minute, although hopefully temporarily

How Van Gogh’s drawing skills were once trumped by a 16-year-old girl

Discovered: a sketch by a pastor’s daughter, who sat beside Van Gogh when they both depicted a woman peeling potatoes

How Van Gogh’s 'Terrace of a Café at Night'—with its starry sky—was inspired by a friend’s painting

The work’s dramatic colour contrast echoes a Parisian street scene by Louis Anquetin, now on show at London’s National Gallery

Van Gogh stars in 'After Impressionism' show at London's National Gallery

Loans include four rarely seen paintings from private collections, with a major rediscovery

Half of Van Gogh’s most expensive paintings have sold to Chinese collectors

The burgeoning growth of the East Asian market pushes up prices for the artist’s work

Van Gogh painted his lyrical Almond Blossom to herald the coming of spring

This picture was given to hang above his two-week-old nephew’s crib—and later survived raucous pillow fights

The Van Gogh phenomenon: our top ten most popular stories on the artist

After 200 posts of the "Adventures with Van Gogh" blog, an intriguing look back at the most-read posts

Did Vincent van Gogh get Gordina pregnant? Christie’s is selling her portrait

Coming up for auction on 28 February for £1m-£2m, the painting has been hidden in a private collection for 120 years

Hidden in a London attic, I discovered a Bible inscribed by Van Gogh

Vincent and his young English friend Harry Gladwell read the book cover-to-cover in their Paris lodgings—possibly praying to avoid the temptations of Montmartre

Was Van Gogh's olive grove landscape another Nazi-era 'forced sale'?

We uncover the tangled tale of the painting controversially sold off by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 and now in an Athens museum

I met the oldest woman in the world—who shared her memories of Van Gogh in Arles

Madame Jeanne Calment, who lived to be 122, recalled meeting the artist as a child

Van Gogh's Tokyo Sunflowers: Was it a Nazi forced sale? And is the painting now worth $250m?

Bought for a Japanese museum in 1987, the masterpiece has just been claimed by the heirs of a Jewish Berlin banker