Van Gogh Museum employees secretly sold Pikachu paintings

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam caused a massive run on Pokémon cards drawn in the style of Van Gogh last year. This caused a lot of hype on social media, which resulted in high visitor numbers for the museum, but also caused a lot of chaos. The same thing happened with the last promotion, where Pikachu paintings in the Van Gogh style were sold by the museum. However, research by Het Parool has revealed that these paintings were unintentionally sold for hundreds of euros by the museum's own employees.

The Van Gogh-Pokémon crossover exhibit featured six paintings of Pokémon in the Dutch artist’s recognizable style. It caused utter madness among visitors desperate to get their hands on rare cards of Pikachu as Van Gogh’s self-portrait, which the museum handed out after a scavenger hunt through the museum.

Pokémon fans and collectors reported that sales of the Pikachu paintings were very irregular in the museum store. Some waited almost a month to buy one of the paintings. According to the visitors, certain paintings on display in the museum store were already "reserved", as the store staff told them. However, according to the museum's spokesperson, this is very unusual and not actually possible, he told the newspaper.

The Pikachu paintings are said to have been sold in the museum for around 120 euros. They were then sold on sales platforms such as Marktplaats and eBay for between 1,200 and 2,500. A profitable business that led to higher demand and therefore even more chaos.

Visitors also reported that they were sometimes approached directly by museum workers, including security, public service, and bar staff, and asked how much money they would spend on one of the Pikachu paintings. One visitor is said to have paid around 1600 euros. It is also said that employees have given visitors their private telephone numbers in order to keep in touch with them about the painting trade.

From mid-December, according to Het Parool’s sources, sales of the canvases suddenly became normal and the canvases became widely available. “Then suddenly five hundred copies were sold in a week, without any fuss,” a source told the newspaper.

Tickets for the exhibit sold out weeks in advance, and the museum stopped handing out cards in October because they were being resold online for exorbitant prices. The exhibition ended on January 7.