A subject with a two-year life

The record dates Cart with Red and White Ox to 1884. Carts are named in two titles in this catalogue, and both are dated 1884; the word does not appear again in any later year of the 610 titles here. Working animals belong to the Brabant end of the chronology and do not travel to Paris or Provence with the painter.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, which holds seventy-two works here, six of them dated 1884. No dimensions are recorded. The measured palette reads as brown.

Where the reading sits

Brown dominates eighteen of the twenty-five works dated 1884, so this entry is typical of its year rather than exceptional in it — which is the useful thing about it. A chronology needs entries that behave, or the outliers mean nothing. Set beside 1890, where one work out of eighty-four returns brown, the year reads as a plateau the catalogue later leaves. The colours named in the title are the record's own words and are not a description of the surface; the measurement, separately, gives what it gives.