A season named four times

The record dates Autumn Landscape with Four Trees to 1885. Autumn is named in four titles in this catalogue, three of them dated 1885 and one dated 1888. Seasons are scarce in these titles compared with places and people, so a year that carries three of the four is worth marking in a chronological arrangement.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 89 by 64 centimetres and is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, one of sixteen entries there dated 1885 — the collection's largest single year in this catalogue. The measured palette reads as ochre.

Ochre returns in 1885

The measurement matters for the date. Ochre dominates no works dated 1884 and no dated 1883, and then nine works dated 1885 return it. From that point the family never leaves: twenty-one in 1887, twenty-one in 1889, eighty-six across the catalogue. An interruption followed by a permanent return is the sort of pattern only a date-ordered corpus shows, and the record explains none of it — it only registers it. Landscapes as a titled type number nineteen here, six of them in this year alone.