Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
The earliest year in this catalogue
The record dates Girl in White in the Woods to 1882, which makes it one of the earliest paintings gathered here. This site arranges van Gogh's painted output by place and period, and 1882 falls before the first of the five stations that give the catalogue its shape: it belongs to the Dutch years that precede Nuenen, when the painter was barely two years into working seriously in paint at all.
What the record gives
The canvas measures 39 x 59 cm, wider than it is tall, and it is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The palette measured from the catalogue image resolves to a single dominant family: brown. That single word is worth pausing on, because it is not an impression but a measurement, and it is repeated across almost everything dated to these years. Of the works from 1884 in this catalogue with a measured palette, roughly seven in ten come back brown. By 1888 the figure is close to nothing.
Where it sits in the arc
Read against what follows, this is the catalogue's baseline. Nothing here anticipates Arles. The interest of an early Dutch canvas is that it establishes the level from which the colour later rises, and a chronological catalogue is only as useful as its earliest entries are honest.
Sources
3 references- Vincent van Gogh — Wikipedia
Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ vɑŋ ˈɣɔx] ; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he c
- Girl in White — Wikipedia
Girl in White (also known as Young Girl Standing Against a Background of Wheat and Woman in a Cornfield) was painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, during the last months of his life. Girl in White has been part of
- Vincent van Gogh - Girl in White in the Woods F8 — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
