The Van Gogh Museum has celebrated its 50^th birthday by handing a sunflower to princess Beatrix – just as it was opened with a sunflower handed to her mother, queen Juliana.

Meanwhile, museum staff handed out “tens of thousands of sunflowers, transforming Museumplein into a colourful sea of flowers,” said the Amsterdam museum in a press statement.

On Friday 2 June, the museum has a Sunflower Art Festival in the gardens outside between 1pm and 5pm, with free flowers, street theatre, painting workshops to recreate Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers on a postcard and music.

There will be a light show with 200 drones at 11pm, by the famous Studio DRIFT, “bringing Van Gogh’s art to life in the night sky” and visible from the pond on Museumplein and online.

The museum, which typically attracts more than two million visitors a year also has a Vincent on Friday evening of music, entertainment and a private view of the current exhibition on the artists’ final months before his suicide, Van Gogh in Auvers.

Since it opened in 1973, the museum says, it has had some 53 million visitors. The record year was 2017, with 2.6 million visits, and famous names on the roster range from Barack and Michelle Obama to The Rolling Stones, Madonna and Adele.

The Starry Night is the most requested painting but, unfortunately, it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.