A subject that exists in one year

The record dates Crab on It`s Back to 1889, the Saint-Remy year in this catalogue's five-part chronology. Crabs are named in two titles here, both dated 1889, and in no other year of the ten. Single-year subjects are common in this corpus and they are the reason a date-ordered arrangement carries more information than an alphabetical one.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 46.5 by 38 centimetres and it is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one of twenty-two works there dated 1889. The measured palette reads as green, a single dominant family.

Green at the end of the decade

Green dominates fifty-three of the 116 works dated 1889, having reached sixty-five of 135 the year before and twelve of seventy in 1885. The family is at a plateau rather than still climbing, which is the general shape of the closing years in these measurements: the readings settle instead of continuing to change. Still lifes as a titled type fall away in this year to four, from thirteen in 1888, so an entry like this one is a minority format in its own year. The record gives no more than the title, the date, the size and the museum.