Paris, from above

The record dates The Roofs of Paris to 1886, the first of the two years this catalogue assigns to Paris. Three titles here name roofs: this one, a second dated 1886, and one dated 1890 at Auvers. The city appears in the titles of this period and then gives way to villages.

What the record gives

The work is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. No dimensions are recorded, so nothing is said about scale. The measured palette reads as neutral — the return for twenty-six works in the whole catalogue, seven of them dated 1886.

Neutral, and where it occurs

A neutral reading means the measurement found no single colour family dominating the surface, and it is uncommon: twenty-six of the 610 works here. Its distribution is lopsided towards the early and middle years — three dated 1884, seven dated 1885, seven dated 1886, then two in 1887 and four in 1888, one in 1889 and one in 1890. The reading effectively disappears after the Paris period. That is an observation about the measurements this catalogue carries, not about the paintings' merits, and no judgement of the picture follows from it.