On the occasion of the museum’s reopening following almost three years of renovation work and to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the Kollwitz Museum Köln received a significant donation from the Canadian collector Brian McCrindle shortly before Christmas 2025: artworks, archival materials and curiosities – including handwritten letters, vintage photographs, historical publications, a pirated cast – and the artist’s earliest known drawing, which had been believed lost.
Kollwitz researchers were aware of the drawing, but its whereabouts remained unclear – until Brian McCrindle acquired a collection of Kollwitz archive materials at an auction in 2014, including this drawing, created by the 16-year-old Käthe Schmidt.
As a young girl, Käthe Schmidt was sent by her father to study under the Königsberg copperplate engraver Rudolf Maurer, who taught her to draw from plaster casts and models. This early study was produced following one such model – namely, an etching depicting a portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer, presumably from a book in her father’s library.
On the reverse of the postcard-sized pencil drawing, its recipient — her friend the philosopher and theologian Georg Paga, whom she had known since her childhood days in Königsberg — noted on 3 June 1946:
»The portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer overleaf is a drawing by the hand of Käthe Kollwitz, which the artist — who had been a friend of mine since our youth — executed for me in 1883 after the etching contained in a biography of the philosopher.«,
