Kröller-Müller State Museum

Kröller-Müller State Museum, collection in Otterlo, Netherlands, primarily of late 19th- and 20th-century art, especially paintings by Vincent van Gogh. The museum is named after shipping heiress Helene Kröller-Müller (1869–1939), whose personal collection constitutes a large portion of the museum’s holdings and who served as its first director in the year prior to her death.

The museum building, which was designed by Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, opened its doors in 1938. It was set in a large game reserve sold by Kröller-Müller and her husband to the Dutch government in 1935. (The collection was donated to the state at the same time.) The 1938 building was intended as a temporary home for the collection pending the completion of a more grandly conceived structure begun in 1920 and abandoned soon thereafter when its completion proved financially untenable for Kröller-Müller. The earlier edifice was never finished, and instead the smaller building was expanded. A sculpture gallery was added in 1953, and a new wing was built during the 1970s.

The collection includes 16th–18th-century Dutch, Italian, and German paintings, European drawings and prints, furniture, Chinese objets d’art, and Chinese, Delft, Egyptian, French, and Greek ceramics.

In 2012 the museum announced that a painting it had acquired in 1974 had been definitively established as a van Gogh through the use of X-ray technology and archival research. Purchased as such, the work’s attribution had been called into question in light of several unusual qualities, including its large size, and in 2003 it had been officially designated as the work of an anonymous artist. The painting, Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses (1886), had been executed on top of a rendering of two wrestlers, visible in high-definition X-rays taken of the work. Though the wrestlers had been detected by X-ray before, a new technique called macro scanning X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF) allowed researchers to identify van Gogh’s characteristic use of pigment and his brushstrokes. That figure study was mentioned by van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo.