As any van Gogh enthusiast will tell you, the 19th century post impressionist has a serious infatuation with the changing seasons. From Spring’s blossoming orchards, to Winter’s gray skies and frozen fields, the seasons represented the circle of life to van Gogh. Now you watch the seasons rotate through the artist’s eyes in the new Van Gogh and the Seasons exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. With nearly 50 paintings and drawings by the Dutch artist—the largest collection of works by van Gogh to ever travel to Australia—curator and former Head of Collections at the Van Gogh Museum, Sjraar van Heugten, has put together a rounded exhibition of works that explore the painter’s incredible ability to capture the seasons in ways that engage all of the senses.
The show has been broken up into four sections assigned to each season. The paintings in the exhibition depict many of the cities and villages where van Gogh saw some of his most defining moments. Van Gogh’s paintings capture the saturated red-and-yellow fields of Brabant, where the artist was born and spent much of his early; the golden wheat fields of Arles in Southern France; the lush meadows of Saint-Rémy de Provence, where he was treated for mental illness, and ultimately the gothic buildings of Auvers-sur-Oise, where he committed suicide in 1890.
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Van Gogh was a prolific artist. Even though he only painted for about a decade, Van Gogh’s oeuvre adds up to a total of nearly 900 paintings; that’s an average of about two per week. The National Gallery is hosting paintings on loan from museums around the world. In addition to major donations from collections the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the exhibition received paintings from the Los Angeles Hammer Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Van Gogh and the Seasons is on at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne from April 28th to July 9th. Learn more about the show on the National Gallery’s website.
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