The first blue in the catalogue

The record dates Head of a Peasant Woman with Dark Cap to 1885, and the measured palette reads as blue. That single word makes this entry the earliest blue reading in the whole catalogue: no work dated before 1885 returns blue as a dominant family, and one dated 1885 does — this one.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, one of sixteen entries there dated 1885. No dimensions are recorded, so no measurement of scale is quoted.

What follows it

From this point the family climbs steadily: three works dated 1886, seven dated 1887, twenty-six dated 1888, which is its single-year peak, then twelve in 1889 and ten in 1890 — fifty-nine across the 610 works in total. A first occurrence only means something if the series after it is counted, and here it is. The reading itself is a measurement of which family covers most of the catalogue image, not a judgement about the picture, and it should not be read as one. This is a peasant head from the last Nuenen year that happens to sit at the start of a ten-year curve, and the record permits exactly that much to be said.