The tower at the end of the Nuenen years

The record dates Country Churchyard and Old Church Tower to 1885, the closing year of the first of the five periods this site is built on. Four titles in this catalogue name a tower — two dated 1884, two dated 1885 — and all four fall inside that period. After 1885 the word does not occur again in any of the 610 titles here.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 79 by 63 centimetres, an upright and among the larger works of the period, and it is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The measured palette reads as brown, the return for thirty-one of the seventy works dated 1885.

Churches, at both ends of the decade

Seven titles here name a church, and they run the length of the chronology: one dated 1882, one 1884, two 1885, one 1889 and two 1890 — the last two at Auvers. The same noun at the two ends of ten years, with five years of near-silence between them, is a pattern the record carries plainly. What it does not carry is any statement about which building is meant in this title, and none is supplied.