One of the few Van Gogh masterpieces not to be included in the National Gallery in London’s blockbuster exhibition “Poets and Lovers,” dedicated to the Post-Impressionist painter, is his Starry Night (1889). Instead, the museum is giving visitors the chance to admire the real-life version before and after they view the show with the surprise announcement of new nighttime opening hours next weekend.

The National Gallery will stay open overnight on Friday, January 17, but night owls should act fast. Tickets for timed slots between 9 p.m. that evening and 10 a.m. the next day have been on sale since this morning, and the exhibition has a track record of selling out fast.

The landmark show was organized to celebrate the museum’s 200th anniversary, grouping highlights from its own collection with over 50 prize loans from Dutch, French, and U.S. museums that broaden our insight into the artist’s unique way of perceiving the world. This latest offer to view the works in the small hours will be a boon for any art-lover who has ever wished to see Van Gogh’s sunflowers by moonlight, or would rather contemplate his Bedroom (1889), than go to theirs.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch) (1888). Photo: © Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean.

This is the only the second time the museum has ever permitted audiences to wander its galleries after nightfall. The last time was over a decade ago, when it trialed a similar event for another hit show, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan.”

The works in “Poets and Lovers” were largely painted in the final few years of Van Gogh’s life, during which he spent much time living in the southern French town of Arles. He made several paintings like The Sower, included in the show, of an agricultural laborer scattering seeds in the cool light of dusk, which casts the landscape in semi-fantastical shades of green, orange, and purple.

One of the portraits is of a fellow painter who van Gogh befriended, Eugène Boch. The appearance of stars in the background give the painting a dreamlike quality.

“Behind his head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of this shabby apartment, I will paint infinity,” Van Gogh decided, in a letter to his brother Theo. “Through this simple combination of the bright head against this rich, blue background, I will obtain a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.”

Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Photo: © Photo © Kunsthaus Zürich.

While living in Arles, Van Gogh rented four rooms in a building that he called “the yellow house.” Finding subjects in his surroundings, he painted his bedroom with green shutters and framed pictures hanging on the wall in a flattened composition influenced by Japanese prints. Before the canvas underwent discoloration with age, the walls were originally purple.

“In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green,” he said. “I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones.”

According to the National Gallery’s director Gabriele Finaldi, who was recently recognized with a knighthood for services to art and culture in the king’s New Years Honours List, the experience of visiting the museum in the very early morning will allow audiences some insight into the habits of some of Britain’s greatest artists.

He said they would be “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,” he said. The late Lucian Freud, who had a show at the National Gallery in 2022, once said he used the museum “as it it were a doctor,” that he could turn to “for ideas and help.”

“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” is on view at the National Gallery in London through January 19, 2025.