Arles, 1888

The record dates Portrait of Madame Ginoux (L'Arlesienne) to 1888 and names the sitter twice over — once by surname and once by the word that means, simply, a woman of Arles. Both halves of the title are useful to a chronological catalogue: the name identifies the person, the epithet identifies the place.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 93 x 74 cm and is held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The measured palette returns yellow and green as the dominant families, the commonest pairing in the Arles year.

Three canvases, two periods

This catalogue holds three works with "Arlesienne" in the title. Two are dated 1888 — this one and L'Arlesienne, Portrait of Madame Ginoux — and the third, The Little Arlesienne, is dated 1890 and held by the Kröller-Müller Museum. That spread across two years and two periods is exactly the sort of thing a catalogue arranged by chronology exists to make visible: a subject taken up in Arles and returned to at the end of the ten years, after the record has moved the painter twice. What passed between the two dates is not something the record here reports, and it is not guessed at.