A place remembered five years late

The record dates Ladies of Arles (Memories of the Garden at Etten) to 1888. Etten is named in one title out of 610, and it is this one — a Dutch place-name appearing in the Arles year and nowhere in the Dutch years themselves. The catalogue holds no painting titled for Etten from the period the title refers back to.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 73.5 by 92.5 centimetres and is held by the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, which holds eight works in this catalogue, dated 1888, 1889 and 1890 — all of them from the closing stretch of the decade. The measured palette reads as green.

Arles, in the titles

Arles is named in twenty-nine titles across the catalogue, twenty-five of them dated 1888. Green, measured here as the sole dominant family, covers sixty-five of the 135 works of that year — up from twelve in 1886. A title that names one place while the record dates it to another is exactly the case a chronological arrangement handles better than a topographical one: the work is filed by when it was made, and the remembered place stays in the title where the record put it. Why the memory, and of what, the record does not say.