Portrait of Andries Bonger (1861-1936), his wife Annie van der Linden and Emile Bernard (1868-1941)

The two men here met at a funeral. In July 1890 Bernard travelled out to Auvers-sur-Oise for Vincent van Gogh's burial and helped hang the dead painter's canvases around the coffin. Among the mourners was Andries Bonger, a Dutch businessman who had married into the family the other way round, as Theo van Gogh's brother-in-law. The friendship held, and 18 years later Bernard painted Bonger with his wife Annie and set himself in beside them, on a square canvas about a metre each way. Bonger collected with a completist's appetite. He wanted the work of two living artists as fully as he could get it, Bernard and Odilon Redon, and both of those collections came to this museum, which is how a French painter's group portrait of his Dutch friends ends up in Amsterdam.