The Trailblazing Heiress Who Backed Van Gogh

Europe’s answer to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Peggy Guggenheim, Helene Kröller-Müller’s influential tastes and expertise, as much as her wealth, saw her establish a new template for art philanthropy and personal legacy-building in the 20th century. She is best-known as one of the very first collectors to recognize the significance of Vincent van Gogh’s unusual painting style. Built over just three decades, she amassed a magnificent collection of some 11,500 objects, featuring luminaries of Neo-Impressionist and Modern art, including Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian.

For more than eight decades, the coveted collection has been on public display at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. Now, the trailblazing collector’s vision is traveling to London with the opening of “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists,” a new loan exhibition at the U.K.’s National Gallery that runs until February 8, 2026.

Taking as its focus the late 19th-century, the show will reveal how a new generation of experimental artists took the baton from the Impressionists and became the oft-cited forefathers of Modern art. In the spotlight are leading figures like Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Camille Pissaro, and Seurat—whose infamous (1889-90) is being shown in the U.K. for the first time—as well as lesser-known but important painters whose careers Kröller-Müller helped establish, like Jan Toorop, Théo van Rysselberghe, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce. The cast is completed with some choice loans from private collections, including works by the notable woman painter Anna Boch.

How did a German heiress with no background in art come to build such an era-defining collection? Born in 1869 to a wealthy industrialist, Kröller-Müller was only 19 when she married her father’s most promising employee, the Dutch entrepreneur Anton Kröller. While he was busy turning Müller & Co. into a highly profitable international powerhouse, Helene had four children before the age of 30. It was only some years later, in 1905, that she was able to dedicate her leisure hours to developing a nascent interest in art.

Soon enough, Kröller-Müller’s beloved teacher Hendricus Petrus Bremmer had become something of a proto-art advisor, visiting studios, galleries, and auction houses on Kröller-Müller’s behalf to help her source new work. By 1913, she had already established a private museum in her name in the Hague, the first dedicated to modern art in the Netherlands.

But as her collection grew rapidly, Kröller-Müller was recognized for much more than merely writing cheques. Long before he became one of art history’s most prized artists, she amassed the largest private Van Gogh collection in the world at no fewer than 91 paintings and 180 works on paper. Her interest in the impact of Neo-Impressionists, like Van Gogh, on the artistic developments of her day even saw her publish the 1925 book, , in which Kröller-Müller proposed two dominant strands in Modern art: realism and idealism.

Kröller-Müller was even a pioneer of the classic “white cube” modern art gallery aesthetic, which she first considered with the prominent De Stijl designer Bart van der Leck in 1916 for the art room in her new villa. Though that plan was eventually abandoned as too radical, the look was later adopted after Kröller-Müller bequeathed her collection to the Dutch nation and oversaw designs for a new museum by the Belgian architect Henry van der Velde. Since opening in 1938, a year before Kröller-Müller’s death, her museum has been housed on Helene and Anton’s formerly private estate, Hoge Veluwe National Park, now a national park in Otterlo.

Here are five standout works going on view at the National Gallery in London.

Vincent van Gogh’s (1888)

Kröller-Müller’s collecting journey began with Van Gogh and she became so enamored with the Dutch artist that, in 1912, she went on a “hunt for all the best Van Goghs” with Bremmer in Paris. When she gave him the spacious front room of her first museum a year later, it was a statement in support of a then overlooked artist. She described the effect of his paintings as “powerful, dramatic & heavy, like hammer blows” bar a few exceptional works that were conversely “delicate or very calm.”

As well as her very first Van Goghs acquired in 1907–(1887) and (1883)–the National Gallery exhibition will include (1888), made after a 1850 painting of the same name by Jean-François Millet. The figure of the agricultural laborer scattering seeds in the warm glow of dusk would become a common theme but, in this instance, most of our attention is on the heavily textured earth of recently ploughed land.

Georges Seurat’s (1889-90)

In developing Pointillism, a painting technique in which a composition is made up of small dots of pure color, Seurat was one of the artists who most boldly developed, and departed from, the ideas of the Impressionists. Unlike their harmonies of similar color, Seurat and his peers positioned contrasting hues beside each other according to scientific color theory, so that they could vibrate and merge in the viewer’s eye. These optical effects were initially met with resistance by critics but at least one Belgian journalist, writing in in 1887, appreciated how they achieved “a higher and sublimated reality.”

, or the , was one of Seurat’s most divisive paintings when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890. Pointillism was dynamized by the complex interplay of lines–in the dancers’ lifted legs, the neck of a musical instrument, and the conductor’s baton–and the composition was widely read as a condemnation of the seedy decadence of the time. Some critics compared its formal language to that of advertisements for popular entertainments. The sense that the image is a contrived depiction rather than a realistic interpretation of events was amplified by the painting of a blue border around the edge of the canvas.

Henri-Edmond Cross’s (1891-92)

After Van Gogh and Seurat, the French painter Henri-Edmond Cross is one of the best represented artists in Kröller-Müller’s collection. He was cherished perhaps most for his placid, abstracted landscapes, which, in the collector’s words, capture a sense of “the unchanging pure reality behind the changeable forms of nature.”

One of his most striking works included in “Radical Harmony,” however, is a bullfight seen from the bleachers. This vantage point becomes a study of the act of looking–a significant portion of the action is concealed by the back of another spectator’s head. Elsewhere, another viewer peers through binoculars. Pointillism is used to capture both large masses in the foreground and each individual audience member on the outer edge of the ring. Cross was cited as a major influence on Henri Matisse’s development of Fauvism at the start of the 20th century.

Jan Toorop’s (ca. 1888-89)

Dutch artist Jan Toorop was a central member of the Belgian avant-garde artistic society Les XX (The Twenty), which played a prominent role in developing Neo-Impressionism. He is notable for his interest in working-class subjects: often young couples who have found a moment of privacy behind a tree in a rural setting, as in (c. 1888-1889).

Two of his most moving works on view at the National Gallery are (c. 1888-89) and  (1888-89), a pair of paintings that pull us into a precarious and impoverished, yet tenderly depicted, world of striking laborers. In the first image, a mother nursing a baby and a father, barefoot and clutching his face in exaggerated despair, crouch in anticipation of violent retribution for having stepped out of line. In the second, their worst suspicions are confirmed as a family are forced to carry away the slumped corpse of a young man. The works were inspired by the poor treatment of strikers in Charleroi.

Théo van Rysselberghe’s (1892)

Another key member of Les XX, the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe is the author of the very last Neo-Impressionist artwork even acquired by Kröller-Müller: , a charming, summery Pointillist composition featuring five women at rest from 1890. Another notable female subject by the painter is fellow Les XX member (1892), in which she appears as though ready to recommence work on the painting before her, wearing a blue smock with her palette in hand.

Like many of her peers, Boch was drawn to everyday subjects and dreamy landscapes. In (pictured above), she tenderly portrays the congregation outside a church in the humble Belgian fishing village where she lived. We get the sense of her familiarity with the local community from the care taken to capture each individual posture, even in figures seen from behind. The artist was recently the subject of a long overdue exhibition “Anna Boch: An Impressionist Journey” in Ostend and Pont-Aven in 2023.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com