The National Gallery in London will be keeping its blockbuster exhibition on Vincent van Gogh open all night on Friday 17 January, the start of the show’s closing weekend, offering a striking reminder of the artist’s enduring popularity. The announcement comes with more than 280,000 people having visited the show since its opening four months ago, making it already the third best attended paid exhibition in the gallery’s history after the loan shows Velázquez, in 2006-07 (302,520), and Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, in 2012 (323,897). Tickets have been quick to sell out throughout the run.
This is the second time the gallery has made one of its exhibitions available for late-night visits, the first being for the Leonardo show. There is precedent among other London institutions, too: in 2015, the Victoria and Albert Museum kept its exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, dedicated to the acclaimed late British fashion designer, open for 24 hours for the final two weekends.
Timed tickets for the overnight viewing can be bought from today (9 January). The gallery has confirmed that the espresso bar and Van Gogh exhibition shop will be open overnight, too.
Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, framed the decision as a chance to experience the gallery at the kind of times that the artists Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney were known to have enjoyed visiting.
“Our visitors will have the rare and special opportunity to experience Van Gogh’s pictures during the night and early hours of the morning following in the footsteps of artists such as Freud, Bacon and Hockney who came here during those times to take inspiration from the Gallery’s collection,” Finaldi said in a statement.
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers explores the critical period that Van Gogh spent in Arles and at the asylum outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in 1888-90, during which he created many of his most famous paintings—The Yellow House and Starry Night over the Rhône among them. The exhibition brings to light the considered way in which Van Gogh thought about his art: it presents two Sunflower paintings, for example, in a triptych with the portrait Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle (La Berceuse), in a formation the artist had imagined.
Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Finaldi added: “Van Gogh has become a talisman for passion, authenticity and commitment to his art. The paintings in this exhibition are among his most striking works and have a freshness and immediacy about them. The show presents Van Gogh as a very serious painter but his ‘lust for life’, as Irving Stone put it, remains evident and infectious.”
The exhibition closes as the National Gallery continues to celebrate its 200th anniversary. Major plans this year include the unveiling of the reimagined Sainsbury Wing, as well as C C Land: The Wonder of Art, a major rehang of the gallery’s permanent collection, both on 10 May.
