The first year in this catalogue

The record dates Still Life with Beer Mug and Fruit to 1881, the earliest year anything here carries. Only two works in this catalogue are dated 1881, and both of them are still lifes. The five places that organise this site do not begin until 1883, so an 1881 entry sits before the chronology proper: it is the floor from which everything after is measured.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, one of three entries here in that collection — the other two are dated 1884 and 1887. The record carries no dimensions, so nothing is said here about its scale. The measured palette reads as brown.

Brown as a starting level

Brown is a dominant family in 102 of the 610 works in this catalogue, and it is not spread evenly across the decade: eighteen of the twenty-five works dated 1884 return brown, and three of the 135 dated 1888 do. That is the whole case for arranging van Gogh by period rather than by subject — the difference between the two ends of the ten years is a measurement, not an impression, and this entry stands at the beginning of it. Why a beer mug, in what room, and for whom are questions the record does not answer, and this page does not answer them either.