The only entry here from Williamstown

The record dates Terrace in the Luxembourg Garden to 1886. The Luxembourg is named in one title in this catalogue of 610 works, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, which holds it, holds one work here in all. A single-entry collection is a reminder that this corpus is assembled from many records, not from one institution's shelf.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 27.1 by 46.1 centimetres, a wide horizontal. The measured palette reads as yellow.

Gardens, before they become the subject

Gardens are named in twenty-four titles in this catalogue, and 1886 has one of them. The count stays low through Paris — three dated 1887 — and then jumps to nine in 1888 and six in 1889, the Arles and Saint-Remy years. A public park in Paris is therefore an early instance of what later becomes one of the catalogue's dominant nouns, and the interest of it is entirely a matter of position in the sequence. Yellow, the family measured here, dominates twenty-five of the sixty-one works dated 1886 and ninety-three of the 135 dated 1888. Who is in the picture, and at what hour, the record does not record.