A species confined to one year

The record dates Study of Pine Trees to 1889. Pines are named in three titles in this catalogue and all of them are dated 1889 — the same pattern as olives and crabs, which is to say the Saint-Remy year has more single-year subjects than any other stretch of the chronology.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 46 by 51 centimetres and is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, which holds seventy-two works in this catalogue. The measured palette reads as brown.

A late brown

Brown as a dominant family belongs to the first half of the decade: 102 works out of 610 return it, with thirty-one of the seventy works dated 1885 and only six of the 116 dated 1889. This entry is one of that late handful. The word study in the title is the record's own, and it is not treated here as evidence about how the work was made or what it was for — the card carries a title, a date, a size, a collection and a colour measurement, and those are the five things this page is willing to say.