The village itself, 1885

The record dates The Vicarage at Nuenen to 1885 and names the place in the title, which is unusual and useful: most of the Dutch works in this catalogue are titled by subject rather than location. Here the title and the date agree with each other, and both agree with the period this catalogue assigns — the Nuenen years, 1883 to 1885, the first of the five places in van Gogh's ten working years.

What the record gives

The canvas is 33 x 43 cm, one of the smaller works of the year, and it is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The measured palette resolves to ochre.

A building, not a landscape

The record files this under architectural subject matter, and that places it alongside the cottages, the church tower and the mill that recur through the Dutch years here. Buildings are the constant of the Brabant period in this catalogue: dwellings, the old tower, the water wheels at Gennep. After 1885 the architecture in the record changes nationality — Paris windmills, an Arles bridge, a yellow house, a church at Auvers — but it never disappears. Following it across the ten years is one way of reading the arc without leaving the register of recorded fact.