If you've ever checked out a book on paintings and looked through those by Vincent Van Gogh, there’s a good chance the location listed for some of those Van Gogh paintings will be the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands. I found this quite odd. Why are there so many Van Gogh paintings at a museum in a small town in the central part of the country? And the museum isn’t even I the small town but rather out in the countryside in a national park. The first time I considered going to the Netherlands about six years ago (I didn’t) I researched the Kroller-Muller and how to get there from Amsterdam via public transportation. It seemed like a lot of work and multiple connections, something done much more easily with a car.

Anyway, the story of the Kroller-Muller Museum and the park it sits in relate to one family . Helene Kroller-Muller was a German heiress to her father’s fortune made in constructing blast furnaces. What is now Hoge Veluwe National Park was their private estate. With an interest in both nature and art, she and her husband Anton went about amassing a huge collection of over 11,000 works of art between 1910 and the 1930s, including the second biggest collection of Van Gogh’s in the world after the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They did so with the intent of opening a museum which happened in 1938 and eventually donating both the museum and its collection and the entire estate to the Dutch nation.

The Kroller-Muller Museum is located deep in the forest in the national park several miles from any of the neighboring towns. It consists of several low wings in a modern building surrounded by a large sculpture park. Although the Kroller-Mullers collected some older art, the vast majority of their holdings were in modern art from the late 1800s and impressionism through to avant-garde stuff in the 1930s. They collected way too much to display in the museum, so only part of the collection is on display at any given time on a rotating basis.

Although most of the most famous Van Goghs were on view during my visit, it was just my luck that a large part of the Van Gogh galleries were closed for a changing installation. As best I can tell what was missing from display included some of his earlier works from his time in Belgium including "The Potato Eaters" and his drawings. Oh well, you can win 'em all! The museums has many interesting paintings and sculptures by other artists too but clearly the highlight is the Van Gogh collection.