Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years and produced around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last four. What follows is the short list — the works most people mean when they say Van Gogh — in the order he painted them, with the dates and the museums that actually hold them.
We have been careful with the details here, because a lot of what circulates about these paintings is wrong. There is a section at the end on the three mistakes that get repeated most, including one that was in our own earlier version of this article.
The Potato Eaters, 1885
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
His first ambitious composition, painted in Nuenen while he was still working in the dark earth colors of Dutch realism. Five peasants around a lamp, eating the potatoes they grew. He deliberately chose coarse-featured models because he wanted the hands in the picture to look like hands that had dug the ground.
It was not well received, including by people close to him. He never changed his mind about it. Years later, after Paris and Arles and everything that came with them, he still described the picture of the peasants eating potatoes as the best thing he had done.
The Paris sunflowers, 1887
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
The less famous sunflowers, and worth knowing about because they explain the famous ones. While living with his brother Theo in Paris between 1886 and 1888, Van Gogh painted several studies of cut sunflower heads lying on a surface rather than standing in a vase.
This is also the period where his palette changed completely. He arrived in Paris painting like the artist of The Potato Eaters and left painting in the colors everyone recognizes.
Café Terrace at Night, September 1888
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
The first of the night paintings, and the first time he used a deep blue sky against artificial yellow light — the combination he would return to for the rest of his life. He painted it outdoors, at night, on the Place du Forum in Arles. You can still stand where he stood.
You will sometimes read that the composition is a coded version of the Last Supper. That is one writer's reading, argued from the central figure and the number of seated people, and it is not a mainstream scholarly position. Interesting, not established.
Starry Night Over the Rhône, September 1888
Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Painted within days of the café terrace, and often confused with the more famous Starry Night of the following year. This one is the quieter picture: the gas lights of Arles reflected in the water, the Great Bear overhead, a couple walking at the edge of the frame. No spirals, no turbulence.
He was pleased enough with it to send a sketch of it in a letter to his friend and fellow painter Eugène Boch.
Sunflowers, August 1888 and January 1889
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Neue Pinakothek, Munich; National Gallery, London; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sompo Museum, Tokyo.
Seven canvases of sunflowers in a vase. Four were painted in a single week in August 1888, one at the turn of that year, and two more in January 1889 as versions of the earlier ones.
He made them to decorate the room Paul Gauguin would occupy at the Yellow House in Arles. It mattered to him a great deal that Gauguin was coming, and the sunflowers were the welcome.
Five of the seven are on public display in the museums above. One is in a private collection and has not been shown in generations. One was bought by a Japanese collector in 1921 and destroyed by fire during the Second World War.
The Bedroom, October 1888
First version: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Second: Art Institute of Chicago. Third: Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
His own bedroom on the upper floor of the Yellow House, painted a month after he moved in. He wanted the picture to communicate rest, and said the flat color and the absence of shadow were meant to do that.
The first version was damaged by damp while he was in hospital in Arles, which is why he painted the two later versions from it.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, January 1889
The Courtauld Gallery, London.
Painted a few weeks after the night of 23 December 1888, when, following a crisis and an argument with Gauguin, he cut off part of his left ear.
A detail worth understanding: in the painting the dressing appears on the right side of the picture. That is because he painted himself in a mirror, so the image is reversed — the ear he injured was the left one.
He painted around 35 self-portraits in total, 27 of them during the Paris years, largely as portrait practice when he could not afford to pay models. Our article on Van Gogh's self-portraits goes into them properly.
Irises, May 1889
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
He began it within a week of admitting himself to the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, painting the flowers in the garden there. He described work as the lightning conductor for his illness, and this is the painting that phrase is usually attached to.
The composition owes a lot to the Japanese prints he collected — the high viewpoint, the cropped edge, the flat bands of color. No sky, no horizon, no depth to speak of.
The Starry Night, June 1889
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The most reproduced of them all, painted at Saint-Rémy about a month after the irises.
It is often described as the view from his window, which is half right. The hills, the cypress and the pre-dawn sky are the view. The village below, with its church spire, is not — there was no such village there. He assembled the picture rather than transcribing it, and it is the only major night scene he painted from memory and imagination rather than in front of the subject.
He was not especially pleased with it. In his letters to Theo he treated it as a study rather than a success, and when he sent work back to the Netherlands he sent other canvases instead. There is a full account in our piece on The Starry Night.
Wheatfield with Cypresses, from July 1889
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery, London; and a private collection.
Three closely related canvases, the first painted in July 1889 and the others after it. Cypresses preoccupied him at Saint-Rémy — he wrote about them as a shape nobody had painted properly, dark and vertical against everything else.
Almond Blossom, February 1890
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Painted for his brother and sister-in-law when their son was born and named Vincent after him. Branches in flower against a plain blue sky, entirely Japanese in construction, and the most openly happy thing he ever made. It hung above the couple's bed.
Wheatfield with Crows, July 1890
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
A wheatfield under a heavy sky with a flock of crows and three paths, one of which goes nowhere.
It is very widely described as his final painting. There is no evidence for that, and specialists point to other canvases from those last weeks as more likely candidates. The idea persists because it is a satisfying ending, not because it is documented.
Three things that get repeated and are wrong
- The Bedroom was not Gauguin's room, and it was not shared. It was Vincent's own bedroom in the Yellow House. Gauguin had a separate room.
- Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is not in Paris. It is at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and has been since Samuel Courtauld bought it in 1928. Our own earlier version of this article had it at the Musée d'Orsay, which was wrong.
- Theo did not paint the sunflowers. Theo was Vincent's younger brother, an art dealer, and the person who supported him financially for most of his working life. The paintings and the letters describing them are Vincent's.
Was he an Impressionist?
Post-Impressionist, which is the label applied after the fact to the generation who absorbed Impressionism and pushed past it — Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat. They never formed a group and would not have used the word about themselves.
What separates Van Gogh from the Impressionists proper is what the color is doing. Monet is describing the light falling on a thing. Van Gogh is using color for what it makes you feel, whether or not the object was that color. That is the door through to Expressionism, which is why he matters as much to the twentieth century as he does to the nineteenth.
Painting one yourself
An honest note, since we sell paint by numbers kits and you may have arrived here looking for one.
We do not make reproductions of famous paintings. Our 39 stock designs are licensed original artwork — landscapes, wildlife, cabins and florals — not Starry Night in numbered sections. Plenty of shops sell those, and we are not one of them.
What we do make is a numbered canvas from your own photograph, printed in the USA. And if the appeal of Van Gogh here is the sunflowers rather than the man, our piece on yellow flower paintings covers why yellow is the hardest color on the palette to handle, which is a good deal of why those canvases are as impressive as they are.
Common questions
How many paintings did Van Gogh make?
Around 860 oil paintings, plus well over a thousand drawings and watercolors, almost all of it in the decade from 1880 to his death in 1890.
Did he really only sell one painting in his life?
This is the most repeated fact about him and it is at best an oversimplification. Documented sales during his lifetime are few, and The Red Vineyard is the one usually named, but he also traded and exchanged work, and Theo was a dealer. He was not commercially successful. He was not entirely unsold.
Which museum has the most Van Goghs?
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, by a wide margin, followed by the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands. If you are only going to one place, go there.
Where is The Starry Night?
The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Starry Night Over the Rhône, the other one, is at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
What order should I look at them in?
Chronologically, as above. The change from The Potato Eaters in 1885 to Almond Blossom in 1890 happens in five years, and it is much more striking when you see it in sequence than when the famous ones are shown on their own.
