Flowers arrive in the Paris year

The record dates Vase with Carnations and Bottle to 1886. Carnations are named in seven titles here: five dated 1886, one dated 1887 and one dated 1890. Nothing before 1886 carries the word. The flower still life, in this catalogue, is a Paris invention that survives to the last year.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 32 by 40 centimetres and is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, one of seven works there dated 1886. The measured palette reads as brown.

A brown reading in a Paris year

Brown dominates twenty-three of the sixty-one works dated 1886 — a large share for the period the catalogue describes as the turn towards colour, and a reminder that the turn is gradual in the measurements even where the account of it is abrupt. The following year the count falls to ten out of ninety-five. Read chronologically, then, 1886 is the year of overlap rather than of change, and an entry like this one belongs to the older half of it. The record names the flowers and the bottle; it does not say whose they were, and no such claim is made here.