Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
The Paris museum with the widest span
The record dates Encampment of Gypsies with Caravans to 1888 and places it in the Musée d'Orsay. That collection holds sixteen works in this catalogue, spread across 1885, 1886, 1887, 1888, 1889 and 1890 — six of the ten years, which is a wider span than any other holding of comparable size. Only the two largest museum holdings here, and the private-collection category, cover more of the decade than that.
What the record gives
The canvas measures 45 by 51 centimetres and the measured palette reads as yellow and green.
A subject that appears twice
Caravans are named in two titles here, one dated 1886 and one dated 1888, and nowhere else in the 610 entries. The Arles year holds 135 works, so a subject occurring once in it is genuinely marginal; the point of counting is to say how marginal rather than to imply significance the record does not carry. Yellow and green, measured here, is the most common pairing in the catalogue as a whole, and 1888 is where it becomes standard. Who was camped there, and for how long, the record does not state.
