Käthe Kollwitz occupied herself with this tragic female figure from Goethe’s drama Faust for a longer period of time. There exist a total of five drawn depictions of Gretchen in a comparable pose, of which the drawing shown here offers the most thorough definition of the figure (see Nagel / Timm, nos. 148-152). An engraving from 1899 adopts this composition, inverted and almost unchanged.1, 2
One of the aforementioned drawings bears, along with the title, the date 1899 in the hand of the artist (see Nagel / Timm no. 150). Nonetheless, the known purchase of an initial engraved version of the Gretchen motif by the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden on January 10, 1899 suggests that Käthe Kollwitz had already begun to grapple with this figure in 1898 (see Knesebeck no. 41).
- August Klipstein:
Käthe Kollwitz - Verzeichnis des graphischen Werkes
Bern 1955, no. 43 - Alexandra von dem Knesebeck:
Käthe Kollwitz - Werksverzeichnis der Grafik,
new edition Bern 2002, Nr. 45