Vincent van Gogh: Country Cottages among Trees

The National Museum in Krakow shows the only Vincent van Gogh painting in a Polish public collection - an intimate, early landscape from 1883, on loan from the John Paul II Collection. This is a single-work exhibition, told around the painting’s remarkable and turbulent history.

The National Museum in Krakow on the exhibition:

In the European Art Gallery of the National Museum in Krakow, we present the only painting by Vincent van Gogh in a Polish public collection, Country Cottages among Trees, from the John Paul II Collection belonging to the Archdiocese of Warsaw.

The work was created in September 1883 and represents the artist’s early, Dutch period. It is an intimate landscape showing modest rural buildings absorbed into a dense mass of trees. The simplicity of the composition, the economy of formal means, and the dark, muted palette place the work within the aesthetic of realism and stand in clear contrast to the artist’s later, French period, marked by intense colour and the experience of Impressionism. The painting shows strong ties to the Hague School, as well as indirect references to the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape.

What to expect

This is an exhibition built around a single painting - and around its surprising story. After van Gogh left Nuenen, the canvas was packed into crates by the artist’s mother and forgotten for years, stored in a carpenter’s attic as a worthless object. In 1902 the contents of the attic were bought for a symbolic sum, and some canvases were given away in exchange for beer. Only the gradual recognition of their value began a process of conservation and sale, through which the painting passed through prestigious private collections before reaching a Christie’s auction in London in 1987 and, finally, the John Paul II Collection.

Tickets, opening hours, and current details are on the National Museum in Krakow website.

Museum profile: National Museum in Krakow - Main Building.