A subject that exists in this record for one year only

The record dates Three Pairs of Shoes to 1886. Two titles in this catalogue name shoes, and both carry that date — nothing before 1886 and nothing after. For a chronological catalogue that is the useful shape: the noun enters the record at the start of the Paris period and leaves it at the end of the same year, so the subject is dated by its own occurrence rather than by anything said about it.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 48.3 by 71.1 centimetres, a broad horizontal, and it is held by the Fogg Museum at Harvard, one of two entries here in that collection, the other dated 1888. The measured palette reads as brown.

A brown reading in the first Paris year

1886 is the first of the two Paris years in this arrangement, and it is transitional in the measured record rather than clean: brown dominates twenty-three of its sixty-one works, down from thirty-one of seventy the year before, but still far above the three of 135 recorded for 1888. An entry like this one sits on the earlier side of its own year. That is a statement about a measurement taken from the catalogue image, and it is the only kind of statement about colour this page makes.