Antwerp, at the edge of the first period

The record dates Quayside with Ships in Antwerp to 1885. Two titles in this catalogue name Antwerp, and both carry that date; no title before or after mentions the city. In the five-place chronology used here, 1885 is the last year of Nuenen and the year before Paris, and a pair of Antwerp titles inside it is a reminder that the five places are an arrangement of a record, not a map of a life.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 20.5 by 27 centimetres. Of the 333 works in this catalogue with a recorded size, only three are smaller. It is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The measured palette reads as ochre.

Ochre, and the year it resumes

Ochre dominates nine of the seventy works dated 1885. That is the family's first substantial year: it appears in three works dated 1882 and in none at all dated 1883 or 1884, then runs at twenty-one in 1887, nineteen in 1888 and twenty-one in 1889. A gap of two years in the middle of a decade is the sort of thing only a dated catalogue shows, and this page reports the gap without accounting for it.