Nuenen, and the loom

Dated 1884, this canvas belongs to the Brabant years, the first of the five places that organise this catalogue. Van Gogh painted weavers repeatedly in that period, and the record here files the work under still life and Realism rather than under portraiture — the apparatus, not the man, is what the title puts first.

The palette of the Dutch years

The measured palette of this canvas is brown, with no second family recorded. That is the signature of the period: across the works in this catalogue dated 1884, brown and ochre account for roughly seven in ten, a proportion that falls year by year until it reaches about one in ten by 1890. The darkness is not a mood attributed after the fact; it is what the pigment measures.

What the record holds

1884, 93 by 68.5 cm, held by the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich. The record gives no month and no location within Nuenen, and none is supplied here.