The floor of the chronology

The record dates Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs to 1881, and only two works in this catalogue carry that year. The five places this site is arranged by — Nuenen, Paris, Arles, Saint-Remy, Auvers — do not open until 1883, so an 1881 entry sits before the chronology rather than inside it. It is the level against which the ten years that follow are read.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which is the only entry in that collection dated 1881 out of 135 it holds here. No dimensions are recorded, so no measurement is quoted. The measured palette reads as ochre and yellow.

A noun that outlives four periods

Clogs are named in four titles across the whole catalogue, and they are spread almost evenly over the decade: one in 1881, one in 1884, one in 1885 and one in 1888. Very few subjects here cross that much distance. Ochre, the family measured on this surface, does not: it dominates one of the two works dated 1881, then vanishes from the record entirely — no works dated 1883 and no dated 1884 return it — before coming back in the later years. A catalogue ordered by date makes an absence like that visible; one ordered by subject would file this entry with the other still lifes and lose it. What was in the room, and why these objects, the record does not say.