Dr. Albert J. Elen (1955) is an art historian and expert in old master drawings (Ph.D. Leiden University 1995). During the last 17 years he has been involved in the search for the missing drawings from the Koenigs Collection in four successive capacities. From 1987 to 1990 he was the first executive of the Netherlands Art Recovery Project and author of the illustrated catalogue of the missing Koenigs drawings (1989). From 1990 to 1993 he was Curator of old master paintings and drawings in the Netherlands Office for Fine Arts (RBK) and responsible for the national collection of artworks recovered after World War II that had become state property, including 38 drawings of the Koenigs Collection. From 1993 to 1996 he was Inspector and from 1996 to 2002 Deputy Chief Inspector of the Inspectorate of Cultural Heritage, a directorate of the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. He was present at the identification of the 307 Koenigs drawings found in the Pushkin Museum in 1993; in 1995 he wrote the catalogue for the Koenigs exhibition Counterparts in Moscow. Since October 2002 Albert Elen has been Senior Curator of prints and drawings, including the Koenigs Collection, in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. [2004]

This publication presents 139 drawings and 3 prints from a recently rediscovered portion of the Koenigs Collection--one of the world's most important pre-war private collections of drawings, assembled in 1920-1930 by the Haarlem-based art collector Franz Koenigs (1881-1941). In 1940, part of the collection illegally came into the hands of German occupiers, and after WWII ended, they were taken by the Red Army as spoils, then rediscovered in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1993. The 142 images reproduced here (50 of which have never before been published) have now been reunited with the greater part of the Koenigs Collection. Includes works by old masters: Jost Amman, Sebald Beham, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein the Elder and the Younger, Hans Baldung Grien, Adam Elsheimer, Wolf Huber, Augustin Hirschvogel, and others. In his introduction, Dr. Albert Elen, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, describes the history of the Koenigs Collection and highlights some of the masterpieces. Edited by Albert J. Elen