The last brown in the catalogue

The record dates Cows to 1890, and the measured palette reads as brown. That makes it the only work dated 1890 whose measurement returns brown as a dominant family: one of the eighty-four entries from the final year. In 1884 the same reading covered eighteen of the twenty-five works dated 1884.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 55 by 65 centimetres and it is held by the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, which holds one work in this catalogue.

A noun that bookends the decade

Cows are named in two titles here, one dated 1883 and one dated 1890, with nothing in between. The subject and the measurement point the same way for once: both belong to the Dutch end of the chronology, and both turn up again, once, in the last year. Across the 610 works in this catalogue brown is the dominant family in 102, most of them dated 1884, 1885 or 1886. This is the tail of that distribution, and it is worth an entry for that reason alone. What the record does not carry is any statement about the circumstances of the last year, and none is made here.