Museum Monday: Vincent van Gogh

Last week M and I began our first true "Museum Monday" visit at the Van Gogh museum.  I picked this for our first art museum visit for several reasons:  interesting art, story appealing to children, and close to home.

Sure, M has been to art museums before, but this would be  little different from his infant visits to the Met and his more recent visits to the Cloisters.  The Cloisters has more objects than paintings, plus the cool knight theme going on.  Looking back, I think his many visits to the Cloisters (as well as countless visits to libraries) helped him to understand "museum etiquette":  quiet voices, no touching, etc.  I set some low expectations for the attention span (30-60 minutes of art looking, then on to the cafe and we could quit whenever M indicated he was done).  It actually went pretty well.


We looked at art for about 45 minutes.  A lot of this involved moving among the different galleries, so the actual art gazing was more like 10-15 minutes, and involved M making up a lot of stories, like, "this is a picture of flowers, from when they first invented flowers..."  But, later that day I was really pleased that, when asked some questions about our day M could recollect:

1. We went to the Vincent van Gogh museum
2. Vincent van Gogh was an artist who painted
3. One interesting thing about Vincent van Gogh was that he cut off part of his own ear.

I'm also fairly certain M could recognize Van Gogh's self portrait, since we spent a lot of time looking at both the oversized version by th entrance and the picture on the brochure.  And he thoroughly enjoyed the giant ice cream he got in the cafe.  I think we will go back at some point.  They have an audio tour specifically designed for children (6 and over, but I'd like to try it in a few months with M).