In making decisions about what images they will show, art directors, publishers, reproduction print makers, and even museums, will often limit themselves to the most popular images in an artist’s oeuvre, particularly when dealing with very popular artists.
This leads to a condition I think of as the “Greatest Hits” syndrome; publishers don’t want to gamble on a possibly more interesting selection, and I suppose, understandably so. They’re simply weighing it as a financial decision, not an artistic one.
However, for those interested in art books and related items, the impression given is that the artists in question produced many fewer works than they actually did. As I’ve pointed out in three previous posts, this is certainly true in the case of Vincent van Gogh.
Here is another round of reproductions of lesser known works of Van Gogh, created over the short but astonishingly prolific 10 years or so that he painted.
In my past articles, I’ve linked to various sources of extensive listings of paintings by Van Gogh. In this case, I’ll point to Wikimedia Commons, which has a chronological list of all his known paintings (excluding watercolors and including a few questionable attributions), as a source of more “not the usual Van Goghs”.
