Last updated August 23, 2026
Van Gogh has two of those already, and the numbering they created — F for de la Faille, JH for Hulsker — is how the paintings are identified in the literature. Neither number is in our data, and no entry here prints one. What an entry carries instead is a Master ID, which is an internal key for this database and nothing more. It is not a raisonne number, it maps to no raisonne number, and it should never be cited as though it did.
What Vincent van Gogh Paintings does hold is two things kept deliberately apart. The record — date, medium, support, dimensions, present collection — is copied out of public collection data, with the source of the copy named. The text under it is drafted by a language model reading that record.
The join is left visible because the halves are worth different amounts. A support given as canvas on cardboard, taken from the holding museum, is a fact with an institution behind it. A paragraph about what the yellow in Arles was doing is a summary with nobody behind it.
Inclusion follows the artist name on the source record. If a public collection credits a painting to van Gogh, it appears here. That is a decision about data, not about authorship: works that a raisonne has rejected, or that specialists still argue over, are inside this catalogue whenever a museum record still carries the name. Nothing here has been weighed against de la Faille, against Hulsker, or against the technical studies that settled several of those arguments — we are not equipped to do it and do not pretend to have done it.
Periods are cut by the year written in the record, and only by that. This matters because with van Gogh the year and the place do not line up: he left Arles for the asylum at Saint-Remy in May 1889, and Saint-Remy for Auvers in May 1890. A calendar year cannot be split between two towns without a work appearing twice, so each year is assigned whole to the place where more of it was painted. The consequence, stated plainly: canvases made in Arles during the first months of 1889 are grouped under Saint-Remy here, and those made at Saint-Remy early in 1890 are grouped under Auvers.
This replaced something worse. Grouping used to run on words in the title, which put a Montmartre path from 1887 into Arles because it mentioned sunflowers, and hung The Starry Night Over the Rhone — Arles, 1888 — in the Saint-Remy room. Dates in the record are wrong less often than titles are misleading, so the date now decides. Where a source dates a canvas wrongly, this site repeats the error faithfully and files the work in the wrong town.
The following would flatter this catalogue and none of it is true:
A modest thing described exactly outlasts an impressive thing described falsely. If another page here contradicts this one, this one is correct — tell us and the other gets fixed.
Every entry rests on three things at once: the collection records behind the catalogue, a language model drafting the context from those records, and editorial curation choosing what is published.
The collection is assembled by Louie Drehmer, who decides what the catalogue admits and runs the pipeline that fills it. Assembling a catalogue and verifying its contents are separate tasks, and doing the first is not evidence of the second.
Van Gogh's paintings are dated, redated and disputed more than most: a canvas assigned to Paris by one catalogue and to Antwerp by another, dimensions recorded before and after a relining, a work whose ownership moved while the databases did not. This site does not adjudicate. Collections are queried in a fixed order, the first value found for a field is kept, and everything a later source would have said about that field is discarded rather than recorded.
What survives is the link between the value and the record it came from, printed on the entry. You can open that record, hold it against another catalogue, and reach your own conclusion — which is the only thing this catalogue is built to make possible.
Attributions arrive verbatim. A record that says "attributed to" or "formerly attributed to" keeps saying it here. We never add that language, and an entry without it is not a claim that the attribution is settled.
Write to letters@vincentvangoghpaintings.com with the URL and the problem — a wrong year, a work that belongs to a different place, a painting no longer credited to him at all. Facts are corrected against the source record, and the entry then shows the day it was last checked, on the page itself.
Substantive corrections move that date. Where the sources will not settle a question, the entry keeps the disagreement in view rather than choosing for you.
A catalogue should be testable from the outside. These are the tests:
Nothing here is bought. The site is funded by print sales, and no sale changes which paintings are catalogued or a word of what is said about them.
