Outside the five places

The record dates Edge of a Wood to 1882. The chronology used here begins with Nuenen in 1883, so this canvas sits a year short of the first of the five periods, among the thirteen works the catalogue dates to 1882.

What the record gives

It is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the second largest institutional holding in this catalogue with seventy-two works, after the Van Gogh Museum's 135. The record gives no dimensions, and none is supplied. The measured palette reads as brown.

The curve this entry sits at the start of

Brown dominates five of the thirteen works dated 1882. The proportion then rises — eighteen of twenty-five in 1884, thirty-one of seventy in 1885 — falls through the Paris years at twenty-three of sixty-one in 1886 and ten of ninety-five in 1887, and collapses afterwards: three of the 135 works dated 1888, and one of the eighty-four dated 1890. Read against that sequence, an entry like this one is not a dark picture but an ordinary one for its date. A catalogue arranged by period exists to make that legible; a catalogue arranged by subject would file this wood with the woods of Provence and lose the point entirely.