Asnières, a place-name that occupies one year

The record dates Bridges across the Seine at Asnieres to 1887, the second of the two Paris years. Sixteen titles in this catalogue name Asnières, and every one of them is dated 1887 — not one before, not one after. Eleven titles name the Seine, and those too are all 1887. Two other place-names behave the same way in this record: Saintes-Maries, four titles all dated 1888, and Auvers, twenty-one titles all dated 1890.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 65 by 52 centimetres, an upright, and it is held by the E.G. Bührle Foundation in Zürich, one of six entries here in that collection. The measured palette reads as yellow and green.

What 1887 looks like in numbers

Ninety-five works in this catalogue carry the date, the largest year before Arles. Yellow dominates fifty-six of them and green twenty-five, while brown has fallen to ten. Ten titles name a bridge across the whole decade, two of them in 1887 and eight in 1888. Set beside the sixteen Asnières entries, that is a year with a small number of subjects worked repeatedly — which is what the record shows, and all it shows. Nothing here rests on anything outside the catalogue's own fields.