A collection that samples three periods

The record dates Head of an Old Peasant Woman with White Cap to 1884 and places it in the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal. That collection holds three works in this catalogue, dated 1881, 1884 and 1887 — one before the chronology begins, one from Nuenen, one from Paris. Small holdings usually cluster in a single year; this one does not, and that makes it useful for reading the decade against itself.

What the record gives

No dimensions are recorded, so no measurement is quoted here. The measured palette reads as brown, the reading returned for eighteen of the twenty-five works dated 1884.

Heads, and the year they belong to

Titles beginning with the words head of number sixteen in this catalogue, and they are almost entirely a Nuenen phenomenon: three dated 1884, twelve dated 1885, and after that one more in the whole of the remaining five years. This entry stands at the start of that run. What the sitter was paid, whether she sat more than once, and how the sequence was ordered are questions the record does not answer, and no answer is invented here.