A head study, in the year of head studies

The record dates Head of a Peasant Woman with Brownish Cap to 1885. Sixteen titles in this catalogue begin with the words head of, and twelve of them carry that same date; the remaining four are dated 1884 and 1889. Concentration like that is what a period looks like from inside a list of titles, and 1885 closes the Nuenen years in this arrangement.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, which holds sixteen of the seventy works this catalogue dates to 1885. No dimensions appear in the record. The measured palette reads as brown.

The peasant, counted across ten years

Thirty-eight titles here name a peasant. Twenty-four of them are dated 1885, and the rest are scattered thinly: one in 1883, three in 1884, one in 1888, six in 1889 and three in 1890. The word survives the whole decade but only in one year does it dominate. A chronological catalogue can state that as arithmetic rather than as narrative, and this page states it and leaves it there. The record names no sitter, and none is guessed at.