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Return of Van Gogh

As Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh's fans rejoice over the return of two of his stolen paintings, Pooja Bhula recalls her visit to the iconic museum in Amsterdam

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(Above) Self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh; (Top) View of the Sea at Scheveningen; (Right) Retrieved painting Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen
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The stormy vision of View of the Sea at Scheveningen that Vincent van Gogh painted at Hague in 1882 and the quaint Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, which the artist gifted his parents in 1884, when his mother was bedridden, will stare at you at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In 2002, it was within a matter of few minutes that Italian mobsters had stolen these two paintings from the museum's collection. So obviously, their return after 14 long years on March 21, has been a great cause of joy and rise in footfalls.

The Italian police found the paintings in Naples a year ago. Although the museum director Axel Rüger said that "the works have suffered relatively little damage", the paintings will be showcased only till May 14.

But a visit to the museum needs no such occasion; it's on the to-do list of most tourists. Imagine the irony – the very first day of my solo trip to Amsterdam, two summers ago, turned into a group experience because a few London-based collegians I met in my hostel at breakfast in were equally excited to go to the museum.

We entered from the main building, a modernist, cubic, brick structure on Paulus Potterstraat also called Rietveld building after its progressive architect. The other entrance is from the elliptical exhibition area, Kurokawa Wing designed by the prolific eponymous Japanese architect such that its box-shaped print room is at an angle to the wing's axis. The queues are always long, but for tickets bought from hostels and hotels that have a separate, shorter one.

Painting his story

Moving from gallery to gallery, you realise that what makes the museum so attractive is not just the fact that it houses the world's largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings – totalling 542 – but also the minute details available to the curious explorer.

The permanent collection displayed in the four-storeyed building begins with the dark, earthy paintings of his early days, depicting peasant life – like The Potato Eaters – that he chose not to romanticise. A distinct change in style and cheery colourfulness emerges out of Van Gogh's time in Paris, partly due to Japanese art that the West greatly admired during the second half of the 19th century. Inspired by their primitiveness and spacial effects, he moves to south of France, expecting to find there 'the clearness of the atmosphere and the gay colour effects' of Oriental prints. He had hundreds of them and copied them, adding layers with his own ideas. Evident is also his keenness to be commissioned to do portraits, in the absence of which he did self-portraits.

Touch, see, smell

The best part? You don't discover all this just from placards, but also from displayed works of his contemporaries, friends and those who inspired him. There are also his letters to his brother Theo and others.

As part of the 'Van Gogh at Work' exhibition his easel and swatches of different canvases he had used were there for us to touch and feel. They've now been removed, but the Self-Portrait gallery still has his palate and paint tubes. The texture of his paintings visibly varies with each canvas-type and the tonality of colours changes when he switches from paints he himself made to ready-made ones available later. Transported back in time, you can imagine him brushing away bold strokes, in the open. By the time you're done, you not only discover his evolution as a painter, but also that of his peers, art in general and art-technology during that period.

The museum hosts workshops and its interactive programme allows the blind to explore through smell, sound and touch.

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