Van Gogh’s Postman Joseph Roulin (July-August 1888)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Robert Treat Paine 2nd)
The most revealing Van Gogh exhibition of the year will be Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits, which opens at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (30 March-7 September) and then goes on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (3 October-11 January 2026). Joseph Roulin, a postman, was Van Gogh’s closest friend in Arles. Vincent not only painted him, but also his wife Augustine and their three children.
Van Gogh and Roulin were drinking companions at the Café de la Gare, close to the artist’s Yellow House and the railway station, where the postman worked. It was Roulin who later supported Van Gogh during the difficult days after the Dutchman mutilated his ear. The Boston-Amsterdam show will include 15 of the 26 Roulin family portraits, which are now scattered in collections across the world.
Anselm Kiefer’s The Starry Night (2019)
© Anselm Kiefer (photograph Georges Poncet)
The German artist Anselm Kiefer, who has been inspired by Van Gogh throughout his 60-year career, will have his work shown alongside that of Vincent. The Kiefer-Van Gogh exhibition opens at the Van Gogh Museum (7 March-9 June) and then travels to London’s Royal Academy of Arts (28 June-26 October).
Charley Toorop’s Borinage Landscape (1922)
Photograph from Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague
Another exhibition charting Van Gogh’s artistic influence will be Charley Toorop: Love for Van Gogh (24 May-14 September) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in the east of the Netherlands. In the early 1920s Charley Toorop was particularly inspired by her Dutch predecessor, as she followed in his footsteps to paint in the places where he had worked.
In preparation for the Otterlo show, the museum is trying to track down a few Toorop works which are now recorded as lost, including Borinage Landscape (1922), which depicts the coal-mining region of southern Belgium where Van Gogh preached to the miners. We (above) reproduce a black-and-white photograph of the missing painting, which was last seen in an Amsterdam exhibition in 1923. Anyone with information on its whereabouts is asked to contact the Kröller-Müller.
Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (March-April 1885)
Noordbrabants Museum, s’Hertogenbosch (photograph Peter Cox)
Celebrating last October’s €9m acquisition of Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (March-April 1885), the Noordbrabants Museum in s’Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) is holding an exhibition entitled The Potato (26 July-23 November). The title refers to Van Gogh’s first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (April-May 1885), which depicts a peasant family around their table in a simple hut, including his model Gordina.
Van Gogh House, Zundert
Van Gogh Brabant
Also in Brabant, the Van Gogh House in Zundert, the artist’s birthplace, will be holding a series of small-scale exhibitions: on Sunflowers (until 16 February), Kiefer (7 March-9 June), Potatoes (28 June-2 November) and Van Gogh’s stay in Antwerp (22 November-March 2026).
Finally, there will be quite a number of Van Gogh exhibitions in Japan. Van Gogh’s Home: the Van Gogh Museum, the Painter’s Legacy, the Family Collection, the Ongoing Story opens at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts (5 July-31 August) and then goes to Tokyo’s Metropolitan Art Museum (12 September–21 December) and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya (tentatively 3 January–23 March 2026).
The Grand Van Gogh Exhibition, with works from the Kröller-Müller, starts at the Kobe City Museum (20 September-1 February 2026) and will tour to the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art (21 February 2026-10 May 2026) and Tokyo’s Ueno Royal Museum (29 May 2026-August 12 2026).
And carrying on from last year, How Van Gogh came to Groningen is at the Groninger Museum until 5 May. Finally, the travelling exhibition on Matthew Wong-Vincent van Gogh is finishing soon at the Kunsthaus Zurich (until 26 January) and then going to Vienna’s Albertina (14 February-22 June).
Books and events
Although there is a continual stream of new picture books on Van Gogh, ones which set out to break fresh ground are not so common. Miles Unger’s A Fire in his Soul: Van Gogh, Paris and the Making of an Artist will be published about Vincent’s two years in Paris (1886-88). Less is known about this period than the rest of his artistic career, because he was living with his brother Theo and therefore wrote very few surviving letters. Hopefully Unger’s book may fill some of the gaps.
Protestant church at Etten, Brabant
Van Gogh Brabant
For those travelling in Vincent’s footsteps, a visit to Etten (where his family lived in 1875-82) will now have an added attraction. The Protestant church where his father was the pastor is to be opened in April, after restoration work, and with a display about the artist.
Van Gogh in Covent Garden
2025 represents the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh’s last year working in London for the Goupil Gallery. He had started there in 1873, having just turned 20, serving as an assistant. He spent the autumn of 1874 at the gallery’s Paris headquarters and after a few days at Christmas with his family in Brabant, he returned to London at the beginning of January 1875, to face a particularly busy time at work.
Van Gogh, aged 19
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
That month Goupil moved its gallery from Southampton St to Bedford St, adjacent roads just north of the Strand in Covent Garden. Writing about the art they then had on sale, Vincent wrote to his brother Theo: “Our gallery is now finished and it’s beautiful, we have many beautiful things at the moment.”
However, it turned out that Van Gogh did not have he necessary qualities to be a dealer, since he was poor at handling customers. A year later he was sacked by Goupil, giving up the art trade - and eventually setting out to become an artist.
