An animal subject, in a catalogue that has almost none

The record dates The Kingfisher to 1886. The bird is named in one title out of 610. Living animals are close to absent from these titles across the ten years: carts and oxen belong to Nuenen, cows appear in two titles a long way apart, and rabbits in one. What the catalogue is full of instead is fields, gardens, portraits and still lifes.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one of nineteen entries there dated 1886. No dimensions are recorded, so nothing is claimed about its scale. The measured palette reads as green and yellow.

Where 1886 sits

The Paris period runs 1886 to 1887 in this arrangement, and the two years are very different sizes: sixty-one works carry the first and ninety-five the second. Green and yellow together, the reading measured here, become the most common pairing of the whole decade, but in 1886 they are still a minority result. An entry with an unrepeated subject and an ordinary measurement is worth keeping precisely because it is not representative of anything; the record has it, the year has it, and that is the claim.