The Parisian Print Renaissance: Inside the Van Gogh Museum’s Fin-de-Siècle French Print Collection

The Van Gogh Museum houses one of the world’s most significant collections of French prints from the second half of the 19th century (1850–1905). Because these works are highly sensitive to light, they are rarely displayed in the museum’s galleries. Fortunately, the collection can now be explored online.

Explore the French Prints

The Van Gogh Museum began assembling its collection of fin-de-siècle prints (1890–1905) in 2000 with a spectacular purchase: 800 prints from a German private collection, acquired courtesy of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation.

The museum continues to expand the collection through ongoing purchases. In recent years, the acquisition focus has shifted toward an earlier generation of printmakers—the Impressionists and other contemporaries of Vincent van Gogh. Today, this unique corpus comprises approximately 2,000 prints.

Printmaking in Paris

During the fin de siècle, printmaking became all the rage among artists. Traditionally, prints served mainly as a means of reproducing paintings and drawings, but around 1890 this changed dramatically.

Increasing emphasis was placed on artistic quality, and printmaking blossomed into an independent art form in its own right. Virtually all French modern artists—including such towering figures as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, the Nabis, and Steinlen—experimented with lithography, etching, and woodcut.

The beautiful and often colorful artworks that resulted were not confined to galleries or the homes of collectors. They appeared all over Paris. The public encountered them everywhere—in posters, theater programs, sheet music, and books—which artists designed on a large scale. In this way, they sought to weave their art directly into daily life.

Featured works from the collection include:

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Poster for the Café-concert Le Divan Japonais, 1893
Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Poster for the tour of Le Chat Noir, 1896
Maurice Denis, Attitudes are Easy and Chaste (Les attitudes sont faciles et chastes), 1899
Henri Gabriel Ibels, At the Circus (Au cirque), 1893

A Closely Knit World

The French world of printmaking during this period was tightly interconnected, with each individual print linked to many others in countless ways.

Artists shared influences, stylistic traits, subjects, techniques, and even the same types of paper. They collaborated with the same printers and publishers, contributed to the same print albums and magazines, and worked alongside the same café-concert performers, theater makers, and dealers.

Explore the Themes

Over 1,300 themes have been assigned to the French print collection. These keywords refer not only to technique and style, but also to the printers, publishers, authors, artists, and theater makers involved—above all, they point to the subjects depicted in the prints.

By systematically tagging every print, the larger connections, stories, and overarching themes reveal themselves organically.

Exploring the theme pages allows you to uncover the rich web of relationships within the French print collection, revealing the fascinating cultural dynamics of this era. Key works featured include:

Henri Rivière, Celebration on the Seine, 14 July (Fête sur la Seine, le 14 Juillet), 1902
Pierre Bonnard, The Little Laundress (La petite blanchisseuse), 1896
Félix Vallotton, Laziness (La paresse), 1896

Result of Multi-Year Research

The study of the Parisian print world is the fruit of many years of meticulous research into the French print collection, generously supported by the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. The first tangible results were presented in 2012 with the exhibition Beauty in Abundance: Highlights of the Print Collection and the accompanying publication Printmaking in Paris: The Rage for Prints at the Fin de Siècle.

The project reached its culmination in 2017 with a major exhibition and the publication Prints in Paris. 1900: From Elite to the Street.

Acknowledgements

The online launch of the French print sub-collection in 2017 was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation and Fonds 21.