A head cannot carry a rank

Everything that identifies an angel by order or by name sits below the neck or beside the body: Michael's armour, Gabriel's lily, Raphael's travelling companions, the wings that mark a figure as belonging to the host at all. A head detaches the figure from every one of them. What is left is a category with no rank attached, which is what the title records and all this entry can support.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1889 and gives Vincent van Gogh, filed as Dutch and Post-Impressionism. It measures 54 x 64 cm. The measured colour family is blue — one of only eight entries here with blue as a measured family, against 88 for brown. The recorded location is a private collection. The title declares the work to be after another painter, and the record adds nothing about which picture was copied or in what circumstances, so this page does not say.

An angel at second hand

Four titles among these 224 entries announce themselves as after, or copies of, another artist's work. That is a small but real category in a catalogue of angels, because it means the figure has passed through two hands and the second may have had no interest in the hierarchy at all. The tradition's ranks were transmitted by altarpieces made for institutions that cared about them. A later copy carries the figure without the scheme.