Van Gogh breaks all records in Orsay with nearly 800,000 visitors

The Musée d'Orsay announced Thursday a “historic record” of attendance with 794,000 visitors for the Van Gogh event exhibition in Auvers-sur-Oise which ended on February 4. “Presented from October 3, 2023 to February 4, 2024, the exhibition attracted 793,556 visitors, or a daily average of 7,181 visitors over 108 days of opening,” the museum said in a press release.

“This is the best exhibition attendance since the opening of the museum (in 1986, Editor's note) ahead of Edvard Munch and his exhibition A Poem of Life, Love and Death in 2022 (724,414 visitors) and Picasso with Blue and pink in 2018 (670,667 visitors),” he added.

Entitled Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, in recent months, this exhibition focused on the last moments of this sacred monster of painting in this small town near Paris where he committed suicide in a field in 1890, at 37 years, after having painted 74 paintings there in 70 days. Among them, there were iconic paintings like Doctor Paul Gachet, The Church of Auvers-sur-Oise, The Wheat Field with Crows or The Roots.

The exhibition also presented an interactive and immersive virtual reality experience at the heart of Van Gogh's palette. Meetings also took place, including one with Wouter Van der Veen, the scientific director of the Van Gogh Institute.

It was the first major exhibition devoted to the works produced by Van Gogh during the last two months of his life and the “culmination of years of research”, according to the museum. “This exhibition proved that, until the end, Van Gogh reinvented himself and forged new paths for art: in Auvers, he found new subjects, developed a more synthetic style, composed on different formats, continues to awaken the colors of the world by inventing new combinations, always with this incredible expressiveness which makes a Van Gogh only resemble Van Gogh!” declares Christophe Leribault, president of the Orsay and Orangerie museums .