The National Gallery marked its 200th birthday with Van Gogh's Arles and Saint-Rémy years, among them Starry Night over the Rhône, The Yellow House and its own Sunflowers.
For its 200th birthday, The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square showed Van Gogh’s two years in Arles and Saint-Rémy, from Saturday 14 September 2024 to Sunday 19 January 2025.
In those two years in the south of France, Van Gogh changed his style through colour and texture. He drew on poets, writers and artists, and his wish to tell stories led to paintings of imagination and romantic love on an ambitious scale.
The exhibition treated the period as decisive in his career. Paintings came from across the globe, some of them rarely seen in public, and hung beside his drawings.
Starry Night over the Rhône (1888) came from the Musée d’Orsay and The Yellow House (1888) from the Van Gogh Museum. A Self-portrait of 1889 travelled from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and The Bedroom (1889) from the Art Institute of Chicago.
The paintings led the eye to a pair of lovers beneath a starry night and to the Poet’s Garden, Van Gogh’s favourite park. The Gallery’s own Sunflowers, painted in 1888, and Van Gogh’s Chair hung beside a second Sunflowers, of 1889, lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.