Paris opens, and the studio props arrive

The record dates Plaster Statuette of a Male Torso to 1886, the first year of the Paris period in this catalogue's chronology. Plaster casts are a Paris subject and almost nothing else here: statuettes are named in five titles, four of them dated 1886 and one dated 1887. Before 1886 the word does not occur at all.

What the record gives

The panel measures 35 by 27 centimetres, a small upright, and it is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — one of nineteen works there dated 1886. The measured palette reads as blue.

1886 is the first year with more than one blue

Blue is the dominant family for one work dated before 1886 and for three dated 1886 itself. The number then keeps rising through the Paris years to seven in 1887. Against that, brown still dominates twenty-three of the sixty-one works dated 1886 — the families overlap in the same year, which is what a transition looks like when it is counted rather than described. The catalogue holds sixty-one works from this year and ninety-five from the next, so Paris is where the corpus itself begins to expand. Whose cast this was, and where it stood, the record does not say.