A name that spans two periods

The record dates Portrait of a Woman (Madame Tanguy) to 1887. Three titles in this catalogue carry the Tanguy name: two dated 1887 and one dated 1888. It is one of the few names to appear on both sides of the boundary between the Paris and Arles periods, and the record gives no more than the coincidence of the name and the dates.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Kunstmuseum Basel, one of three entries here in that collection, the others dated 1886 and 1887. No dimensions are recorded. The measured palette reads as brown and red.

A late brown reading

Brown dominates only ten of the ninety-five works dated 1887, down from twenty-three of sixty-one the year before and thirty-one of seventy in 1885. Red, the second family in this measurement, is scarce throughout: thirty works in the whole catalogue, eight of them in 1887. A canvas returning both is on the older side of its own year, and saying so is possible only because every entry here carries a date. Forty-eight titles in this catalogue contain the word portrait, fourteen of them dated 1887 — the second largest count of any year, after 1888. No sitter's circumstances are described here, because the record describes none.