The reddest year in the catalogue

The record dates Still Life with Mussels and Shrimp to 1886, and the measured palette reads as red. Red is a dominant family in thirty works across the whole catalogue, and ten of those thirty are dated 1886 — more than in any other year of the decade. The count then falls to eight in 1887, two in 1888, none at all in 1889 and one in 1890.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds nineteen of the sixty-one works dated 1886. No dimensions are recorded.

A single title, in a crowded format

This is the only title in the catalogue that names mussels or shrimp, and one of six still lifes dated 1886 out of sixty-six across the ten years. The still life is the format that spans the entire chronology, which makes it a useful place to see a year's measurements without the subject changing underneath them. That the reddest year of the decade is also the first Paris year is a coincidence the record shows and this page does not attempt to explain — a measured palette is a measurement of a catalogue image, and nothing about what the picture depicts follows from it.