A bibliography printed once at site level would say nothing about the canvas you have open. Every reference here belongs to an individual entry and sits beside the field it supports, linked.
Where the list is on the page, a value can be followed to the record it came from without any step that depends on trusting us.
Where it is missing, nothing is being concealed and nothing has been confirmed: the sourcing pass has not reached that painting. Most of the catalogue is in that state, and such an entry is a copied record, not a checked one.
Public, machine-readable and open to inspection. Never read here and never implied: unpublished archives, private papers, dissertations, subscription journals. No one is interviewed, and no museum is a partner.
The standard references for this painter are the catalogues raisonnes and the letters. Neither is in our data. No entry carries an F number or a JH number, no entry quotes or paraphrases a letter to Theo, and no line of this site should be taken as evidence about whether a work is accepted, rejected or still argued over. If you need a raisonne number, this is the wrong catalogue, and saying so costs us nothing worth keeping.
The Master ID on an entry is an internal key for this database. It is stable, which makes it useful for pointing at a page, and it is meaningless outside this site — do not put it in a footnote as if it identified the painting in the literature.
A field with two answers gets one of them on the page, with its source named and no comparison offered. Consultation order is fixed and the first answer is the one kept; alternatives are discarded at collection time. Because dates on this artist move around more than most, an entry's date should be read as the reading of one institution rather than as a settled year.
It is drafted by a language model from the entry's own fields. It is not an authority, and it has no place in a bibliography as scholarship. Cite the record we link to for a fact; cite the entry, described accurately, if you are quoting our summary.
Why the catalogue is built this way is set out in the editorial policy.
Every painting has a companion page that builds the reference in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard, reachable from the citation link on the artwork page at /cite/{artist}/{title}.
Two points worth carrying over into the footnote. The Master ID is permanent within this site, so a corrected spelling or slug never repoints your reference. And where a verification date is shown, use it as the last-updated value; where none is shown, which is usual, cite your own access date instead.
For the catalogue as a whole: Vincent van Gogh Paintings, vincentvangoghpaintings.com.
Send the URL and the fault to letters@vincentvangoghpaintings.com. Dead links, records that do not support what we report, fields with no source at all, and paintings filed under the wrong period because their recorded year is wrong — all of it is useful.
Correcting an entry against its source updates the verification date on it. Where there is no date, the entry has never been checked, and that remains the common case.
