Kröller-Müller Museum

Deep in the heathland and pine forest of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, the Kröller-Müller Museum holds one of the most personal art collections ever turned into a public museum. It was assembled by Helene Kröller-Müller, wife of a wealthy industrialist, who began buying art on the advice of the teacher and critic H. P. Bremmer and bought her first Van Gogh, a small wood scene, in 1908. Over some twenty years she and her husband Anton built up the second-largest Van Gogh collection in the world — today 88 paintings and around 170 works on paper — and in 1935 she handed the whole collection to the Dutch state on condition that a museum be built for it.

That museum opened in 1938 in a low, restrained building by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, with daylight falling on the walls from above. The Van Gogh rooms move from the dark Dutch years — including a version of The Potato Eaters — through Paris, where he painted Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed and a self-portrait Helene bought in 1919, to Arles and Saint-Rémy: Café Terrace at Night with its first starry sky, the drawbridge at Arles with its debt to Japanese prints, the garden of the asylum. Around them hang Seurat, Redon, Mondrian, Braque, Picasso, Gauguin and Ensor — a collection shaped by one person's conviction about where modern art was going.

A new wing by Wim Quist opened in 1977, but for many visitors the second great attraction lies outdoors. The sculpture garden, opened in 1961, now spreads over more than 30 hectares of lawn and woodland — one of the largest in Europe — with works by Rodin, Henry Moore and many modern and contemporary artists placed among the trees. Its most surprising piece is Jean Dubuffet's Jardin d'émail, a white, black-outlined landscape you can walk across, like stepping into a drawing.

What makes the visit memorable is the combination: you arrive through a national park of sand drifts, heather and forest, often by bicycle, and then stand in front of Van Gogh's most famous canvases with almost no city noise around.

Getting there

The museum is at Houtkampweg 6 in De Hoge Veluwe National Park, near the village of Otterlo and about 14 km from the centre of Arnhem. The closest park entrance is at Otterlo, 2.5 km from the museum; the Hoenderloo entrance is 4 km away and Schaarsbergen 10 km. White bicycles can be taken from the entrances and the park centre. By public transport, take bus 108 from Ede-Wageningen or Apeldoorn station to the Otterlo, Rotonde stop, then bus 106 into the park to the museum stop. The nearest airport is Weeze (NRN) in Germany, about 59 km away; within the Netherlands, Eindhoven (EIN) is about 78 km away, and Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) is the country's main international gateway.