1887, the peak year for still life

The record dates Still Life with Basket of Apples (to Lucien Pissarro) to 1887. Still lifes are named in sixty-six titles across this catalogue, and sixteen of them are dated 1887 — more than any other year, ahead of thirteen in 1888 and twelve in 1885. The format is at its most concentrated exactly where the chronology has the painter in a city.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. No dimensions are recorded, so no measurement is quoted here. The measured palette reads as yellow.

Apples across three years

Apples are named in seven titles here: three dated 1885, one dated 1886 and three dated 1887, and none at all after that. The dedication carried in this title, to a fellow painter, is the record's own wording and is left as it stands; nothing about the circumstances behind it is established by the card, and nothing is inferred. Yellow, the measured family, dominates fifty-six of the ninety-five works dated 1887, against twenty-six of the seventy dated 1885.