Terrace of a Cafe on Montmartre "La Guinguette"

Paris opens the second period

The record dates Terrace of a Cafe on Montmartre "La Guinguette" to 1886, the first of the two Paris years in this catalogue's chronology. Ten titles here name Montmartre, eight of them dated 1886 and two dated 1887, and none outside those two years. The place-name enters the catalogue and leaves it inside a single period.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, one of sixteen entries here in that collection. No dimensions are recorded, so no size is quoted. The measured palette reads as yellow.

1886 as a transition, in counts

Sixty-one works in this catalogue are dated 1886. Brown still dominates twenty-three of them and yellow twenty-five — the first year since 1883 in which yellow outnumbers brown, after two years in which brown ran ahead at eighteen against six and thirty-one against twenty-six. The year after, the gap widens to fifty-six against ten out of ninety-five. The crossing happens inside the Paris period rather than at Arles, where the popular account usually puts it. This entry is dated to the year the crossing occurs. Whether it was painted before or after any particular canvas of that year is not something the record can settle, and no order within the year is proposed here.