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.