The year sitters acquire names

The record dates Peasant Woman, Portrait of Gordina de Groot to 1885. Titles that begin portrait of number thirty in this catalogue, and 1885 is the first year that has any: four of them. The count then runs seven in 1887, twelve in 1888, five in 1889 and two in 1890. A named sitter is a dating device in its own right, because the naming habit itself starts somewhere.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 41 by 34.5 centimetres, a small upright, and the location is given as a private collection — thirteen of the seventy works dated 1885 are recorded that way. The measured palette reads as ochre.

Ochre in the Nuenen year

Ochre dominates nine of the works dated 1885, against no the year before. A reading that was absent for two consecutive years and then appears nine times is a measurable event, and it sits inside the last year of the first period. Who Gordina de Groot was beyond the name on the card, how the sitting was arranged, and whether other versions exist are not things the record establishes, and this page does not extend it.