This Scratch-Off Poster Lets You Keep Track of All the Van Gogh Paintings You’ve Seen

Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh, 1889.
Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh, 1889. | National Gallery of Art, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

People love scratch-off cards, posters, and famous artworks—so why not put them all together? Today Is Art Day combines all three in their Vincent van Gogh Scratch Poster, which you can use to record the van Gogh paintings you’ve seen in museums around the world.

The poster includes 40 minuscule renderings of van Gogh’s most notable works, each covered in a thin layer of foil that you can satisfyingly scratch off with a coin. Its primary purpose is to help you keep track of which masterpieces you’ve actually seen in person, and, at 17 by 24 inches, it can also solve your problem of how to fill that blank bit of wall space you’ve been staring at for far too long.

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The paintings are organized in the following categories: self-portraits, early works, places, portraits, still lifes, and nature. So you’ll never mistake Still Life: Vase With Fifteen Sunflowers for Still Life: Vase With Twelve Sunflowers again. We recommend that you keep this solution sheet somewhere accessible and consult it before you scratch off a spot, because van Gogh titled several paintings similarly or even identically—three of the six self-portraits are simply named Self-Portrait.

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It’s true that you’ll have to do a fair bit of traveling in order to complete the bucket list, but a cursory glance at this list of museums where the paintings are located will tell you that some house multiple works. After a trip to Paris’s Musée d'Orsay, for example, you can scratch off a Self-Portrait, The Church at Auvers, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Portrait of Eugene Boch, and Starry Night over the Rhone. And you can scratch off 15 of the 40 works without even leaving the U.S. Three, including The Starry Night, are in New York City, and Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Pasadena, New Haven, and Washington, D.C. all boast guardianship of at least one artwork each.

An astute disclaimer on Today Is Art Day’s product page advises you to verify with museums that specific paintings are on display before you visit, since exhibits can change.

You can purchase the poster for $20 from Today Is Art Day’s website here, and it will ship by mid-August.