Prawns and Mussels

Van Gogh's first autumn in Paris, 1886. Earlier that year he had spent a few months in Fernand Cormon's studio, drawing from the model and the plaster cast, and the schooling that mattered was happening at home, on the table. He wrote to Horace Livens, an English painter he had met at the academy in Antwerp, that he was making a series of colour studies, looking for oppositions of blue with orange, red with green, yellow with violet. That is what this small canvas is. Orange-red prawns laid against the blue-grey of mussel shells, and almost nothing else to look at. He came back to market food repeatedly that year, painting smoked herrings on a plate more than once, with the attention other painters were giving to flowers.