From the museum website, 10 July 2008
This year the museum has succeeded in acquiring two drawings of Jan Toorop with the support of the BankGiro Loterij: Bean Cutter from 1905 and Picking up Potatoes from 1907, which form a beautiful series with Bean Harvest from 1906, which was already in the collection.
Jan Toorop (1858-1928) was one of Helene Kröller-Müller’s favourite artists. It is thanks to her that the museum that bears her name has such a marvellous collection of his paintings, drawings and prints. The artist was at his best in his drawings: a steady and consistent oeuvre using a variety of media on paper. The museum’s collection of his drawings could serve as the basis for a comprehensive survey of the artist’s drawings, but until recently an important link was missing: the drawings he made during his regular visits to Zeeland. These highly attractive drawings are remarkable for their great freedom of expression, but they also show how Toorop was influenced by Vincent van Gogh.
The museum has always been eager to acquire drawings from the Zeeland period, in order to complete this highly specialised collection and also to stress the relationship with the museum’s rich collection of works by Vincent van Gogh.
The new acquisitions are displayed in a temporary presentation alongside a selection of other works by Toorop from the collection. The selection is supplemented with a temporary loan: a drawing with the same subject as the recently acquired Bean Cutter. Together, these two drawings provide a rare opportunity to see how Toorop dealt with the same subject using different techniques and colour palettes. The presentation is on show until August 3, 2008.