Van Gogh Museum

Built around the private collection of Vincent's brother Theo and preserved by nephew Vincent Willem, the Van Gogh Museum tells the story of a career that lasted only ten years but changed painting forever. Sunflowers, The Bedroom, Almond Blossom, self-portraits and the shattering final wheat fields are all here, arranged chronologically across four floors so you watch the palette explode from dark Dutch browns into the electric yellows of Arles. The Kurokawa wing hosts sharp temporary shows on Van Gogh's contemporaries and influences. The collection passed to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962, Gerrit Rietveld's severe grey block opened on Museumplein in 1973, Kisho Kurokawa's oval wing followed in 1999 and Hans van Heeswijk's glass entrance hall in 2015. Gauguin's portrait of his friend at the easel, Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, hangs among works by Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bernard and Signac. Book the slot first and build the rest of your day around it.

This is the most tightly ticketed museum in the Netherlands — every slot is timed and you cannot buy tickets at the door. Book two weeks ahead in summer. Go for the 9:00 opening or the Friday 19:00 slot for the least crowded rooms. Floor 1 (the chronological Van Gogh galleries) is where 90% of visitors cluster, so consider working top-down starting with Floor 3 and its context pieces. Security screening happens under cover just inside the glass hall, and the cloakroom on -1 takes the backpacks that are not allowed upstairs; together those two steps eat about ten minutes, so turn up at the start of your slot rather than halfway through it. Hangings rotate and floor allocations shift when a large loan exhibition arrives, so follow the year labels in the wall texts rather than a plan you memorised on the tram.

The sequence begins in the Brabant years — Nuenen weavers, peasant heads and the brown-black Potato Eaters of 1885 — which most visitors march past and shouldn’t, because the Arles yellows only land if you have seen the mud they grew out of. Paris follows: copies after Japanese prints, The Courtesan after Eisen, Skull of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette, and the self-portraits painted in Theo's flat on Rue Lepic. Then Arles, and the room where Sunflowers and The Bedroom face each other over the heads of the crowd. Saint-Rémy brings the turquoise of Almond Blossom; Auvers closes with Tree Roots and Wheatfield with Crows. The study level holds letters, drawings and Van Gogh's own hoard of several hundred Japanese woodblock prints, rotated because paper cannot take the light. Give it twenty minutes — it explains the paintings better than any tour does.

Trams 2 and 12 stop at Van Baerlestraat, three minutes from the entrance; tram 5 stops at Museumplein, two minutes away and the better choice if you are coming up from the Zuidas. A single GVB ticket costs about €3.40 and covers an hour, a 24-hour ticket about €9.50, both tapped on and off. From Amsterdam Centraal the tram takes roughly 15 minutes, while walking it takes 30 through the canal belt, which is the better use of the time in dry weather. Metro 52 to De Pijp leaves a 12-minute walk across the Ruysdaelkade, and Amsterdam Zuid station is 20 minutes on foot. Trains reach Centraal in about 15 minutes from Haarlem, 12 from Zaandam and 35-40 from Alkmaar or Hoorn. Do not drive: Q-Park Museumplein sits under the square at full city-centre rates. Park at a ring-road P+R and finish by tram.

Adult entry is €24, 18-24s pay €12, and under-18s are free but still need their own booked slot. Museumkaart holders add a €4 reservation fee per visit, which is the only meaningful catch in an otherwise simple system. Temporary exhibitions in the Kurokawa wing are covered by the standard ticket, so there is nothing to upgrade once you are inside. The multimedia guide is a small extra added at booking and is the one add-on worth taking on a first visit; the guided tours touted on the square by third parties can cost four times the ticket and deliver you to the same rooms at the same hour. There is no combination ticket with the Rijksmuseum, around €25, or with the Stedelijk next door — each is booked separately. The I amsterdam City Card includes entry but still demands an online time slot.

Hour by hour, the 9:00 and 9:15 slots buy you a genuinely calm forty minutes before the tour groups land; from about 11:00 to 15:00 the Arles room is a scrum, and after 16:00 it thins again. Friday evening, running to 21:00, is the single best window of the week: fewer bodies, live music in the atrium, and the Auvers gallery almost civilised by 20:00. Month by month, January and February after the January 1 closure, plus November, are the quietest stretches of the year. Easter, King's Day on 27 April, the tulip weeks of March to May, July and August and the Christmas period are all heavy. Winter has one drawback worth packing for: the approach across Museumplein is flat, open and wind-blasted, and any wait outside the glass hall is fully exposed. Take the coat.

Lifts serve every level, the entrance from Museumplein is step-free, and wheelchairs can be borrowed at the cloakroom on -1 — this is one of the easier major museums in the country to roll around, though the Arles galleries at midday are too tight for comfort, so book a morning slot. Families do well: under-18s are free, there is a children's multimedia tour aimed at roughly 6-12s, and the paintings themselves hold small attention spans better than most collections. Teenagers will be done in 75 minutes and that is fine. On a wet afternoon it is an obvious choice, which is exactly why everyone else has the same idea. If you have only an hour before a train from Centraal, skip it — security, the cloakroom, the tram back and the slot system will eat the hour before you reach Sunflowers.

The Stedelijk Museum shares the same square and is two minutes away; the Rijksmuseum is a four-minute walk across the lawn; Moco Museum sits on Honthorststraat, two minutes north. The Concertgebouw is five minutes away and runs free lunchtime concerts on Wednesdays at 12:30 — arrive by noon, because the queue for those is real. Vondelpark's eastern gate is five minutes west if you want grass after four floors of galleries. For food, the Cobra Café on the square is convenient rather than good; Café Loetje on Johannes Vermeerstraat, eight minutes south, does the steak that locals actually queue for, and the Albert Cuypmarkt is a 15-minute walk east through De Pijp. A sane half-day is the 9:00 Van Gogh slot, lunch in De Pijp, then the Rijksmuseum in the afternoon — two blockbusters in one day is the ceiling.

Two things are routinely oversold. First, the collection is not a greatest-hits reel: The Starry Night is in New York and Café Terrace at Night belongs to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, about 90 minutes away in Gelderland and well outside Noord-Holland. People arrive expecting both and leave faintly cheated, which is a shame given what is actually on the walls. Second, the various immersive Van Gogh projection shows advertised around the city are unconnected to this museum and contain no original paintings. Add the smaller irritations: the Sunflowers wall is a forest of raised phones for most of the day, the shop bottlenecks at closing, and the temporary exhibition can require its own short queue inside. None of it is a reason to stay away — it is a reason to take the 9:00 or the Friday 19:00 slot and mean it.

Time needed

Under 18 free · Museumkaart accepted

Daily 9:00-18:00 · Fri until 21:00 · Closed January 1

What to see

{'what': 'Sunflowers (1889)', 'where': 'Floor 1, Arles gallery'}

{'what': 'The Bedroom in Arles', 'where': 'Floor 1, Arles gallery, opposite wall from Sunflowers'}

{'what': 'Wheatfield with Crows', 'where': 'Floor 1, Auvers-sur-Oise final gallery'}

Tips from the ground

Only online tickets are sold — the box office does not exist. Book on vangoghmuseum.nl.

Friday evenings often have live music in the atrium and are noticeably quieter than weekdays.

The cloakroom on -1 is free and has a shortcut queue if you enter from the Museumplein side.