Book Description

The prints and drawings of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) include some of the world's best-known, most popular, and most valuable pieces. This volume is a catalog of van Gogh drawings and prints that are currently under the care of the Kröller-Müller Museum, located near the village of Otterlo in the Netherlands. Catalogued for the first time in 1917, these works have undergone four different editions of the cataloguing process by four different members of the museum staff since World War II alone, and always in the company of van Gogh's more famous paintings. Now, for the first time, the drawings have been studied independently, and the information gathered here presents a remarkably clear overview of the present scholarship and art historical research on the authenticity, dating, provenance, and exhibitions of the work. Differing in many ways from the last collection catalog of van Gogh's drawings and paintings (which was published nearly thirty years ago), this volume not only produces new information on the provenance of certain works, but frequently comes up with a sharper analysis of the techniques and materials used by the artist, as well as new dates for individual drawings. Doubts that have arisen about the authenticity of certain juvenilia by van Gogh are here provided with a well-reasoned foundation, and with the publication of this edition--which complements a 2003 catalog of van Gogh's paintings--a period of intensive research on van Gogh's works in the collection has been brought to a close, culminating in this impeccably researched catalog and its accompanying wealth of full-color images.