1886: the Paris years begin

The record dates A Pair of Shoes to 1886, the first of the two Paris years in this catalogue's chronology. It is a transitional date by definition, and the catalogue makes that legible in aggregate: 1886 is the year in which brown stops being the default. Among works with a measured palette, brown and ochre dominate 57% of 1885 and 46% of 1886, then fall to a third of 1887 and to 16% of 1888.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 45 x 37.5 cm and is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The measured palette returns ochre and yellow as the dominant families — a Paris-year reading, warm but no longer the flat brown of Nuenen.

Not the only pair

Worn boots are a motif the painter returned to. This catalogue also holds Three Pairs of Shoes, likewise dated 1886, held by the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Two canvases of the same subject in the same year is the kind of duplication that makes a catalogue useful, provided the entries are kept apart: they differ in size, in the number of objects the title records, and in the collection that holds them. Collapsing them into one famous picture, as popular accounts do, loses precisely the information the record exists to preserve.