A word that occurs once in 610 titles

The record dates Farmhouse with Peat Stacks to 1883, the opening year of the Nuenen period in this catalogue's five-part chronology. Peat is named in one title here and nowhere else across the ten years. A fuel stack is about as local and as datable as a motif gets, and it belongs to the Dutch end of the decade by itself.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one of three entries there dated 1883. No dimensions are recorded, so nothing is said here about its scale. The measured palette reads as yellow.

Yellow, before Provence

The measurement is the part worth pausing on. Yellow is the dominant family in seven of the nine works dated 1883 — the highest share of any year in the catalogue, although on a base of only nine works. That is not a claim about brightness; the measurement records which family occupies most of the surface, and a dull yellow-brown reads as yellow the same way a bright one does. It is a useful corrective all the same, because the usual account of the Dutch years does not lead a reader to expect it. Farmhouses are named in seven titles here, three of them dated 1883.