The last Nuenen year, in Paris

The record dates Peasant Woman by the Hearth to 1885 and places the work at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, one of sixteen entries here in that collection. The subject belongs to the first of this site's five periods and the location to a city that does not enter the chronology until the following year — a coincidence of fields worth noticing precisely because it means nothing about when the canvas was painted.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 29 by 40 centimetres, a small horizontal. The measured palette reads as yellow and green. That is an early return for the pairing: green dominates twelve of the seventy works dated 1885, and yellow twenty-six, against sixty-five and ninety-three respectively out of the 135 works dated 1888.

One title, one word

This is the only title in the whole catalogue that contains the word hearth. Single occurrences are the ordinary condition of a subject index built from titles — most nouns appear once — and they are the reason this site groups by date instead. A word that occurs once cannot organise anything; a year that holds seventy works can. Of the twenty-four titles naming a peasant in 1885, this is among the few that names an interior rather than a field, and that is as far as the record allows the observation to go.