Dutch art museum where wolves are watching you

Michael Hodges visits the home of the world's second-largest Van Gogh collection – and much more besides

- Michael Hodges

The wolves are mainly nocturnal," says the park ranger at the entrance to the Kroller-Muller Museum. “You probably won't see them, but they can see you.” I've come for the art but other things, it seems, might be watching me. And there are many paintings to see. The Kroller-Muller Museum in the Gelderland region of the eastern Netherlands, opened by the German philanthropist Helene Kroller-Muller and her Dutch industrialist husband, Anton Kroller, in 1938, holds the world’s second-largest Van Gogh collection.

There is also a fabulous array of early modern art, especially from Neo-Impressionist artists, often called Pointillists, who used dots and dashes to build colour effect. The movement emerged in 1880s in France and two of its leading exponents, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac - whose work the visionary Kroller-Muller made a point of buying - are at the heart of the museum’s loan to the National Gallery in London for what promises to be a revelatory show this September: Radical Harmony: Helene Kroller-Muller’s Neo-Impressionists.

But the fabulous collection isn’t the only noteworthy thing about the Kroller-Muller Museum; it also happens to be inside the De Hoge Veluwe National Park. This is a unique landscape of ancient deciduous woodland and heath, home to wild boar and mouflon sheep, red deer and, as I’ve just been told, wolves.